On The Rag – dubbed ‘America’s second greatest tabloid’ by The New York Post – celebrated their UK launch this week. We speak to founder Sammy Loren about injecting new life into London’s literary scene
It took an invasion of London by America’s greatest tabloid – second only to the New York Post, if you ask the New York Post – to break my reading sabbatical.
Sometime over the past two years, the number of literary readings in London exploded. Fan favourites include Soho Reading Series, New Work, New Papers, Die Quieter Please. Some more of my favourites include Kiss+Tell, Reenchantment and regular launches for titles by Sticky Fingers Publishing and If A Leaf Falls Press. The reawakening spawned several attempts at market dissection. Most focused on airs of glamour, sex and possibly meaningful connection. All of these things were appealing at the start. I was entering my twenties and nothing seemed more adult than a salon. But then the novelty of immodestly heterosexual conversations about Oxford gossip and natural wines wore off. Fatigue hit.
However, news of the London launch of On The Rag, Sammy Loren’s high-low literary tabloid and off-shoot of his LA reading series Casual Encountersz, finds me and a crowd of stylish smokers waiting to be shepherded into Soho’s Beasy Bar. In the meantime, we take turns drunkenly petting Phillipa Horan’s dog, Montagu. A friend of hers, who has been tasked with holding Montagu’s lead, says that the rottweiler “mostly lies flat because it gets him attention”. He is far from the only attendee to understand its value.
I ask Loren what he makes of the more superficial motivations for attendance. He reassures me the ‘why’ doesn’t bother him. “What we want,” he says, and, indeed, what these gatherings ultimately pursue, “is [for] people to be engaged with literature and buying literature and reading literature and living literary lives.”
Loren describes On The Rag as “equal parts literary journal, gossip rag and conceptual art project”. He blends broadsheet print production with a digital identity ‘resurrecting’ Craigslist’s now-dead Casual Encounters, a hookup forum by way of personals section. On The Rag feels like proper, pulpy newsprint. Its pages cover sex stories, art reviews and advice columns. Its online voice, emulated by forum lurkers to varying degrees of success, falls somewhere between irreverent teenage girl and Trumpspeak.
Beasy Bar provides the perfect amount of cheese to compliment the Rag’s louche flirtations. Just in case one forgets where they are, a neon sign reading ‘Sorry I’m Beasy’ flashes in millennial cursive. The room is packed to the point of touching arses, so the readers resolve to take turns standing on a bar counter. It’s an impressive line-up: Holly Connolly, Stephanie Wambugu, Alexis Okeowo, Thea Maclachlan, Zoe Guttenplan, Yelena Zhelezov, Matthew Benson-Strohmayer, Ed Luker, Maxine Beiny. Attendees stuck outside, having lost the survival of the fittest, poke their heads around the doorway to listen.
The readings are inflected with desire, obsession, rejection. Loren asserts that he “never give[s] people topics”, but that the spirit of the publication is “clearly one obsessed with intrigue and romance”. Psychology and literature go hand-in-hand, so there’s little surprising about the overlaps. What’s more interesting, and worth mining, is what these writers tease out of their depictions: the moments of farce and dramatic slippage punctuating their mires. Zhelezov’s protagonist is left panicking when their sexual partner has a seizure mid-act, believing they’ve “fucked someone into a coma”. Luker’s chronicle of a terrible date – “the first and last time I’ll be on page 3 of a tabloid”, he says – ends with an unsolicited apology carved into the potato topping of a shepherd’s pie.
Stephanie Wambugu, coming off of Soho Reading Series’ raucous launch for her novel Lonely Crowds, makes the audience laugh long and loud with her piece. ‘Blind Date’ tautly renders the fallibility of desire in an app-run dating scene. A potential suitor’s vague identification as a person of colour boils down to ‘half-nomadic’. Matthew Benson’s introduction notes that he’s ‘just here for Kara Walker’, reading her essay ‘Burning Down the House’, published in Boy.Brother.Friend. A caricature of ‘Daddy’ Trump’s rise falls away to a greater realisation of collective rage.
I was skeptical of how On The Rag would fare in the land of tabloid culture. But Loren’s done it before in La Prensa, a nota roja that serialised ‘La Mora’, his story of a gringo entangled in the underworld of Mexico City. The tabloid continues to be a resonant format as a material outlet for the urban underbelly. The salaciousness, the sleaze, the hard flash – it all contributes to a vulgar, nonetheless prescient, way of depicting the sparks and shudders of reality.
Before the readings, Loren read a post from the On The Rag forum titled ‘The guy who runs this is a complete prick’. The anonymous writer bitterly calls him ‘literally as old as time’. As we consider the length of the London literary wave, Loren tacitly suggests that Casual Encountersz spurred it on. A 2023 collaboration with London gallery South Parade saw readings from house names like Rachel Connolly and Lucie Elven.
I ask Loren about longevity. “I’d love to institutionalise, whatever that looks like,” he says. He’s considered the possibility of a successor for Casual Encountersz. But there’s a style and sensibility to perfect, and present threats to ward off. After our interview, he heads off to tackle a lawsuit that emerged the morning of our meeting. “Two days out in this fucking city.”
I think On The Rag will last, like the world’s sexiest cockroach. The enfant terrible gets to stay young forever.