Introducing Dirt Books, a Publishing Imprint For the 22nd Century

Dirt, which has fast become one of our favorite sites for off-the-beaten-path media takes, is launching an imprint. Please give a warm welcome to Dirt Books.

The brand new house aims to shake up the old publishing playbook by exploding notions of genre and form, and celebrating the subcultures driving artistic innovation. This mission picks up the mandate of Dirt: the brand/newsletter/podcast, which has been mixing cultural journalism with emerging technology since its founding in 2021. 

Starting this year, Dirt Books will publish at least two titles per annum, with a focus on strong voices and unique perspectives. This isn’t the company’s first venture into the literary arts. Previously the site has published excerpts and shorts from authors like Stephanie Wambugu, Erin Somers, and the late polymath, Joe Brainard. 

According to CEO Daisy Alioto, the new imprint’s brief will be wide but deep. “In short: the ideal Dirt Books title is a story that could not be told any other way.”

To kick off its catalogue, the imprint has announced its first two acquisitions—a novel, and a memoir. Both are slated for publication in 2026. 

*

Lauren Napier’s Tattooed, Pierced & Fucked-Up: A Scene Memoir 2004–2008 will be Dirt’s first nonfiction title.

This motley collection of diary entries, photos, and interviews from writer, musician, and visual artist Lauren Napier (pictured above) takes readers straight into the early aughts pop punk scene.

A sneak peek from Napier’s Tattooed, Pierced & Fucked-Up: A Scene Memoir 2004–2008.

Napier looks back at stints on the era-defining Vans Warped Tour, and on the road with bands like My Chemical Romance, Sugarcult, and Reagan Youth.

This tender, candid multimedia archive will blend essay and memoir, and nostalgia with a contemporary curiosity. 

Another glimpse at the upcoming memoir. (CC: Millennial catnip.)

*

Geoffrey Mak’s debut novel Total Depravity will kick off Dirt’s fiction list.

Mak (pictured below), author of Mean Boys and co-editor of Writing on Raving, now takes his incisive eye to Berlin’s rave scene.

Total Depravity follows a young trans woman as she falls in with a shadowy cast of nightlife characters who partake in strange rituals.

Framed as a psychological thriller for fans of Gillian Flynn’s suspense antics and Donna Tartt’s cerebral ones, this novel evokes the underground with an insider’s eye. Mak’s eye for detail is the kind that can only come from someone who has successfully gotten into Berghain. 

Keep your eyes peeled for these exciting titles. And know there’s plenty more to come.

*

As Alioto told The New York Times in 2024, the whole Dirt endeavor—or, “Dirtyverse”—was born of a deep frustration with the digital media ecosystem in the time of the mega-corps.

Even the site name reflects this—as Alioto mused to the Times on a visit to Walter De Maria’s “Earth Room,” a large scale installation that is exactly what it sounds like.

The 250 cubic yards of dirt enclosed in a Lower Manhattan gallery seemed to the CEO “like a metaphor for what’s happening in media and culture right now… insisting on the value of something that the wealthiest people see as worthless or disposable.”

Along with co-founder Kyle Chayka, now of The New Yorker, Alioto first imagined Dirt as a moment-meeting entertainment brand that brooks very little techno-pessimism. As she told the Times, early visions pegged the site as “the Condé Nast of newsletters” or “the LVMH of media.” 

Specifically, Alioto sought to reimagine the magazine as a many-pronged vehicle for promising tastes—like those of regular contributors and critical heavies, Grace Byron and Greta Rainbow. 

The company initially stood out from a glut of peer projects for applying that boundary-breaking, tech-forward ethos to its business model. Dirt’s first readers could subscribe to the venture only through cryptocurrency.

Though this is no longer the case—now you can support the site via good old-fashioned credit card—this origin story says something about the innovators’ relationship to an old media playbook they see as terminally out of touch.

And to this end, Dirt Books is committed to reimagining the model. The new imprint will use its roots in the technology world to experiment with software and hardware products that “complement traditional print distribution.”

So you know this ain’t your mama’s backlist.

Dirt Books’ brand new site is designed by Neesh Chaudhary at Topiary.

Say hello to a publishing house with its eyes on the 22nd century.