Two years ago, Allison Parrish produced a diary of an expedition through “fantastical places that do not exist.” The twist? The diary was generated by a computer program, which extracted more than 5,700 sentences drawn from Project Gutenberg and later recombined at random by “switching out grammatical constituents.” An extract of the finished work, interspersed with Parrish’s nonfiction essay, can be read here.
Allison Parrish’s Generated Novel
Poetry in a Box
Recommended Reading: On poetry about poem-making and the poetics of assemblage.
Authors on Trump
A formidable group of authors, including Year in Reading alum Joyce Carol Oates, Steven Pinker, and Rich Benjamin, comment on Donald Trump’s rise to power. You could also consider this literary cage match between Trump, Faulkner, and Hemingway.
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Tuesday New Release Day
A week after it wins the Booker, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is now on American shelves. Jonathan Lethem’s newest Chronic City comes out today. Dave Eggers’ novelization of a movie based on a children’s book, Wild Things is out in standard and special fur-covered editions. A Lydia Davis-translated French “masterpiece” is out today from NYRB Classics.
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Sink Your Teeth Into These Reads
Carolyn Kellogg rounded up a great list of “Terrible Beach Reads,” and it serves as a nice companion to Rachel Meier’s list of “Burnt-out Summer Reads.” However, if you’re looking for a few more titles that’ll keep you out of the water, allow me to suggest my all-time favorite shark-centric books: Susan Casey’s The Devil’s Teeth, Michael Capuzzo’s Close to Shore, and Doug Stanton’s In Harm’s Way.
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Cat’s TV
This week in book-to-film adaptation news: Kurt Vonnegut‘s Cat’s Cradle is slated to become a TV show, “which will hopefully be long enough to fill an entire week’s worth of classes” for any desperate English teachers out there.