"Hey, Upper East Siders. Gossip Girl here. And I have the biggest news ever." Every episode starts like this. We're Upper East Siders; Gossip Girl tells us we are. But also, we aren't and never will be. All we can do is look inside. Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella follows Gossip Girl, an anonymous blog, and the prep school students she reports on, who snitch on each other for likes. They include: Nate, beautiful transgender himbo, Bernie Madoff's son; Serena (It Girl); Dan (vengeful alt nerd). Meanwhile, in the year 2030, Gordon (former TV protege) starts writing for Gossip Girl 3: the Reboot. Will he self-sabotage? Or...? Gossip Girl began as a YA book series; it was first published in 2002, one year into America's War on Terror. Soon adapted for TV, Gossip Girl premiered on the CW network in 2007, swerving through the Financial Crash, and ending in 2012, midway through the Obama years. Interlaced with essays on transsexuality, clones, dissociating, American Apparel, and affect theorist Lauren Berlant, Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella is a parasocial eulogy for the aughts.

I love a book which invents its own genre. Which is why I love Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella. It's some kind of auto(fan)fiction. Markbreiter uses the conventions of fanfiction as a dissociated way of writing about trans-ness. But it's also a perfect form for his writing about social media, its effects on language, on style, on love, on attachment, on intellectual and emotional labor, on whatever the ruling class has become in this century. XOXO--McKenzie Wark

Charlie Markbreiter's writing has been published in venues such as Bookforum, Art in America, and The New Inquiry, where he serves as the Managing Editor. A PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, he is also a mod of the Death Panel Discord, a free school/health justice forum. He is not a Gossip Girl character, or that's what you think. He lives in New York. Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella is his first book.