Less than a year after its creation, the Writers’ Quarter had become the hip place to be: the place in New York New York where it was cool to be seen hanging out, where it was desirable to have an address.

Any author of a bestselling novel had a duty to live in the quarter. Anyone wishing to find housing in the quarter was required to write a novel and get it published. Novel production felt the effects. Tons of new novels were printed. They arrived en masse at bookstores, which no longer had room for a Poetry or Non-Novel Non-Poetry section. The Newly Released Novels section took up the entire sales floor.

It was the time of the novelists, the young novelists. They always had something to say. Always a comment in store, a witty remark ready to let fly. Guiding them was their need to express themselves and make that known. They said they had a special thing called World Vision. Which often led them to have visions, and always concerned the world in its globality. Each new World Vision was tested out in conversations at bars, in restaurants, in public debates, in local media. And, depending on the reception that each received, they’d decide whether or not to write a book about it. A film or at least a screenplay? They would rely on their insight to formulate a personal and sensitive vision of the world in which we are condemned to live, you see, so we might as well accept it and just read the novels of today. In private, they gladly opened up about their pride at having succeeded before turning thirty. It was a habit of theirs to intransitively use the verb succeed. They’d managed to turn a manuscript into a bestseller, so, in a nutshell, they’d succeeded (unlike others). Obsessed with this powerful sense of accomplishment, they’d acquired the certainty that they embodied the literature of their time. Their critic friends recognized in them a talent for capturing the vibe of their era, a capacity to describe transformations of the present and envision paths for the future. The first book was a youthful impulse, the second a transition toward the third, which was the work of a maturity that following works strove to consolidate into one sensitive and singular oeuvre.

Under the pretext that they were the most important voices of their generation (one only needed to see how much they were both quoted and solicited), they claimed and secured housing in the quarter. Each time an old novelist died, his apartment was taken over by a new bestselling novelist. By virtue of which, the Writers’ Quarter became theirs.

Since novel production didn’t stop growing in New York New York, since everyone wanted to do the young-novelist thing as new novelists popped up every day, and since each new novelist exercised his right to housing, the Writers’ Quarter became saturated. There wasn’t a single apartment available, not even a cellar or a tiny room to sublet. Even if you were an established writer (with more than ten books officially published, including paperback editions, translations, adaptations, reviews, quotations, exegeses, congresses, conferences, symposiums, prizes, grants, residencies), you would be told: sorry, we don’t have anything at this time, the demand exceeds the supply, too much literature, not enough housing.

Rents skyrocketed. The Writers’ Quarter became completely unaffordable, among the most expensive neighbourhoods in the city. It got to the point that living in the Writers’ Quarter became inaccessible to the majority of them. The writers who’d been there from the beginning, its founders in a way, the first writers to inhabit the quarter, were also the first to leave it. They sold their writers’ lofts to guys from television, to actors, journalists and other finance types who had moved on to writing novels. After settling down in the Writers’ Quarter, guys from television, actors, finance types and journalists persisted in the writing and publishing of books. They said: We’re the writers now. We know the formula for a bestseller. It was a smash hit in bookstores.