The Greatest Living Writer by Sophie Newman

A.X. Benjamin lived in a Scandinavian-inspired glass house on the edge of a mountain proximal to rivers and woods. It wasn’t far from the desert, either. Every day, A.X. Benjamin rose at 4 a.m. to write in a semi-fugue state for three hours before measuring 10.2 g of Chilean coffee beans, heating water to 195 degrees Fahrenheit, and allowing the grounds to sit in their glass chamber for 85 seconds before filtering them into his pre-heated cup. 

A.X. Benjamin was lauded by all the major outlets. His work was a sensation, a literary tour-de-force, revelatory, fierce, delightful, brilliant, masterful, insightful, vast, full of heart, full of humor, full of wisdom, brimming with the truths of the human experience. After his writing and coffee, A.X. Benjamin donned a recycled hemp jogging suit and went for a three-to-six-mile walk in the woods. Three if he felt ahead and six if he felt behind. 

A stream of reporters came and went from A.X. Benjamin’s house. Some were awestruck, and others were jealous. They asked, don’t you wish you had married or had kids? They asked, doesn’t it get lonely up on the mountain? And A.X. Benjamin always replied no, not because it wasn’t true, but because they were missing the point.

He slept with one of the reporters, yes. This was years ago. Naomi was young but not exactly beautiful, due to deep pits of acne scars on her cheeks and a kind of gruffness like someone exhausted from a long day of manual labor. She had only earned this job, she said, because her uncle worked at the paper. Not that she wasn’t qualified, but lots of other people were, and success wasn’t necessarily a straight line but an alchemy of luck and persistence. While Naomi talked, A.X. Benjamin thought about how he would describe her: was her hair espresso or mahogany? Were her lips like a cupid’s bow, or were they the real thing? 

To be clear, he only meant to use Naomi as a vehicle for his work. But he agreed to show her his library, and she commented on his first editions of Anna Kavan, who hardly any journalist knew, and when A.X. Benjamin began to tell her about the miserable life Kavan led, and how that wasn’t even her real name, Naomi asked if he read all that in an article in her paper. A.X. Benjamin said he had, in fact, and she told him that she had written the article, and it was terrible, one of her worst. 

Then, she asked if he knew the philosophy riddle about the ship of Theseus. She explained how his writing was the ship—an artful arrangement of everything he’d ever read in a different form. She wondered aloud if literature had reached the end of history. Was anything worth saying? It was that moment when A.X. Benjamin first felt at a loss for words.

Who knew where Naomi was now? A.X. Benjamin only skimmed the news on days a reporter visited so as not to be embarrassed if the visitor were to make an offhand joke or political comment. Every time he talked, A.X. Benjamin took care to remember he was the world’s greatest living writer, and anything he said could be taken out of context, thus accidentally prompting a revolution, or ushering in a new era of thought. To answer Naomi’s question, history was not over and wouldn’t be until everyone was dead. 

But there was something Naomi said to A.X. Benjamin that he would never forget. She said, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone who you really are. This was after when they were lying in bed, and Naomi was stroking the tassels on his comforter. At the time, A.X. Benjamin laughed, but long after she left, he began to wake in the night with an uncanny kind of panic and say out loud to himself, (or perhaps just in his head), I am the greatest living writer. Here is the greatest living writer making coffee. Here is the greatest living writer out for a walk. Very occasionally, he ran into people on the walks and took care to pretend he wasn’t famous. Usually, they didn’t even notice him. They had children or dogs or partners and were embroiled in the problems of normal people, such as soccer schedules and who is coming to dinner, problems that would have taken away the most precious thing to the greatest living writer—time.

No, he only had to be concerned with death! Love! Beauty! Joy! Sorrow! He refused to succumb to the idea—espoused by one particularly jealous reporter—that he couldn’t understand these things because he hadn’t lived them. Who did not understand love? And he was loved at some point, most certainly by his mother if not his father. He didn’t see what the big deal was with obsessing over recurrence. 

After finishing his 10th novel, A.X. Benjamin finally allowed himself to read the article Naomi wrote about him years ago. It was no different, really, from the others. Then, he allowed himself to remember her—the acne scars, the mahogany hair, the line of singular importance. Only, he questioned these details. He examined each memory like a detective looking for evidence of a crime, and eventually, he found himself guilty. They were simply literary devices he had employed in order to turn her into a character, and how silly, he’d forgotten his own prerogative. To prove his point, A.X. Benjamin read more of Naomi’s work, staying up until light crept through his enormous windows, and found that the more he read, the more Naomi became a stranger. Still, he could only hear the words in her voice. 

When the light fully entered the room, causing A.X. Benjamin to shield his eyes from its assault, he found Naomi’s obituary. A.X. Benjamin stared at a photo of her with other strangers that loved and knew her better than he ever would. A woman the greatest living writer slept with once, died, he thought to himself. Many years later, the writer looked up the woman…no, not looked up. Searched for? 

A tragedy, wasn’t it? A.X. Benjamin rose, half-blinded, and made an uncharacteristic second cup of coffee. He paced in front of his windows trying to decide the degree of sadness the greatest living writer would feel about a woman who didn’t love him but loved the same writer he had. That had to be something, didn’t it? There had to be a reason for his obsession, or was it simply a casualty of his brilliance? A.X. Benjamin wracked his brain for the answer. There was no one else to ask since he was the foremost expert.

Finally, when the sun was again disappearing, A.X. Benjamin went out on his deck and contemplated the depth of the drop into the canyon. What a melodramatic demise for his readers to ponder! Does the writer’s ability to capture reality preclude his ability to experience it? Does the writing kill the writer? What if it wasn’t his writing that was the ship of Theseus, like Naomi said, but him, A.X. Benjamin, composed of tiny molecules that when added together, were really just billions of molecules, and nothing more. 

Maybe, it would be better for readers not to know the ending. He would leave off just at the moment before the tragedy, so that the story would live on in its endless possibility. Mystery was a kind of tragedy in itself, since humans, at the end of the day, want more than anything to be known. A.X. Benjamin toed the edge of the wood, coffee stirring in his stomach. And he thought about how wonderful it would be—how awful and true—that no one would be there to write about it. 

Sophie Newman is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Literary Hub, The Saturday Evening Post, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University.

16 January 2026