Author Simone O. Elias Bypasses Traditional Publishing with Open Access Release

Sixteen-year-old Simone O. Elias has a lot to say about her generation and the way it is perceived by society.

Read Porcelain Rage at archive.org.

Rather than wait for a traditional publisher, the Berkeley, California, teen says she felt an urgency to get her message out and reach as many people as possible. On July 24, she released her second book, Porcelain Rage: A Manifesto for the Gen Z Woman, online at the Internet Archive.

In her new book, Elias reflects on cultural trends impacting young women and the challenges that come with the digital age. It explains the good, the bad, and the complexity of the moment, weaving in philosophy and history. The chapters include critiques of the Barbie movie, “sad girl” pop music, pilates, and podcasts.

She analyzes the pressures facing her generation and says Gen Z women are reclaiming femininity in a new way.

“This decade, we’ve decided to burn the playbook and make our own,” Elias writes in the forward to the book. “We can hold two truths simultaneously: the porcelain-perfect, pink image of the women of the past and the rageful, angry, sad, feral versions of ourselves. The contradiction is the point. It is our reality.”

Porcelain Rage is her second book.

At age 13, she landed a contract from McFarland, an academic press, to write Old Films, Young Eyes: A Teenage Take on Hollywood’s Golden Age, which was published in 2024.

Her new book also has a chapter about her struggle with mental health and chronicles the mistreatment of girls who have been institutionalized, in a parallel to Nellie Bly’s 19th-century expose Ten Days in a Madhouse. Through her writing, Elias says she wants to humanize a generation that she claims is often misunderstood.

“It’s about balancing the expectations of perfection in the modern age and the rage and mental illness that we are experiencing at catastrophic levels these days,” Elias says.

Register for a book talk with Elias & author Sonia Mansfield on August 4, 2026, at the Internet Archive.

Elias comes from a family of writers (her mother, Jessica Carew Kraft, author of Why We Need to Be Wild; her grandfather, Thomas Elias, Pulitzer-nominated columnist for California Focus; and her grandmother, Marilyn Elias, a journalist for USA Today). Her father, Jordan Elias, is a plaintiffs’ class-action lawyer who helped spearhead a case against Google for monopolizing digital advertising and advocates for the public’s right to access judicial records and histories to protect against sealing by corporations.

Simone grew up in San Francisco and attended preschool across the street from the Internet Archive at Congregation Beth Sholom. Since she was 13, she has been involved with the Internet Archive, conducting a series of podcast interviews, judging film contests, and helping with public-domain movie nights.

“When I was looking for a place to house a book that is so firmly rooted in public utility and using information for the improvement of people, it was obvious to go with [the Internet Archive],” Elias says.

Choosing the open-access route and bypassing a publisher, she says she was able to be authentic in her analysis. Her hope is that removing any barriers means a broad audience will read the book.

“The book was not so much an end to a conversation, but a start. The ultimate goal is to have young women talking about this with each other instead of holding it in,” Elias says. “It’s supposed to function as a manifesto, a survival guide, a definitive blueprint of what we’re dealing with in America as women today through our culture.”

In an introductory note about the publishing model for Porcelain Rage, Elias says her choice to post her book on archive.org may seem jarring or unprecedented. Yet she argues this avenue allows her freedom to tell her story unfiltered.

“I’m sick of how the industry puts women into neat little saleable categories,” Elias writes of traditional publishers in the book. “We don’t need more palatable stories in an unpalatable world. This book is free, uncensored, and completely yours. That’s how it should be.”

BOOK TALK
Internet Archive will host a book talk with Elias and author Sonia Mansfield on August 4th at the Internet Archive. Registration is free. If you can’t make it in person, the discussion will be livestreamed.
– Register for the in-person gathering at the Internet Archive.
– Watch the livestream.