Mentioned in:
Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview
January
Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF]
I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart
Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F]
A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS
Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF]
Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF]
In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS
Relic by Ed Simon [NF]
From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS
Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF]
The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman
Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF]
A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F]
In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF
The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF]
Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF
The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF]
Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS
Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF]
University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS
We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF]
Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F]
In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF
Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF]
Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS
The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F]
Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS
Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F]
In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS
I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF]
Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS
Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F]
Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N]
New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS
The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF]
Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch
Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F]
Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF
The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF]
Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F]
Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS
February
Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F]
Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher
The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF]
This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF]
Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS
Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF]
Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS
Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF]
Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF
Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F]
Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF
Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF]
Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS
Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF]
Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS
A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F]
Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS
Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF]
Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB
Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF]
Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS
Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F]
Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK
The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F]
I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS
Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F]
Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS
The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF]
Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB
Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF]
As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB
Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF]
In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS
I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F]
When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright
Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF]
I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK
Language City by Ross Perlin [NF]
Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS
Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F]
A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM
Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F]
A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM
Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F]
A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM
American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F]
Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF
Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF]
I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS
Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF]
Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB
Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF]
This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK
Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F]
Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS
Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F]
Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS
Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF]
Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA
The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF]
The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF
Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF]
Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F]
Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA
March
The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F]
Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F]
When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA
Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F]
This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA
The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F]
I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK
Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF]
Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F]
When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA
My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F]
Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe."
Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF]
Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF
The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF]
Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS
The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F]
Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS
Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF]
This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF
It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F]
Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF
Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F]
When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK
Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F]
Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS
But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F]
Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM
Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF]
Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F]
A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS
The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF]
In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS
You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF]
Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS
Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F]
Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS
Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF]
What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS
The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF]
After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS
Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F]
There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F]
Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM
Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F]
Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS
Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF]
Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS
James by Percival Everett [F]
In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB
A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF]
Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS
Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF]
Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS
Green Frog by Gina Chung [F]
Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS
No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF]
Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F]
Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS
On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF]
Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS
There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF]
Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS
The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F]
The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA
Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F]
This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF
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On AI, Authorship, and Algorithmic Literature
So we, boys, weWill die fighting, or live free,And down with all kings but King Ludd.—Lord Byron, “Song of the Luddites” (1816)
If a real-life John Henry were to compete against an AI in a similar contest, it is unlikely that he would be able to win… It is worth noting that the story of John Henry is a legend, and there is no historical evidence that he existed.—Chat GPT-3 (2023)
The particulars don’t matter much when it comes to archetypes. The location of the attic where Faustus conjured Mephistopheles, the logistics of the Tower of Babel, the latitude of Atlantis and the longitude of Eden—none of it matters. What’s of concern is the cost of a soul, the incommunicability of humanity, the direction of paradise. And so, when it comes to John Henry, the American Icarus who bet his sweat and labor against a machine, it matters not whether the folk hero’s famed competition against a steam-powered rock-drilling device happened by the mossy shores of West Virginia’s Greenbriar River, or in the green hills of the Shenandoah, or atop the rich soil of Alabama’s Coosa Mountain. It doesn’t even matter that the “real” Henry, to the best of scholarship’s archival shuffling, seems to have died not from exhaustion after besting the machine intended to take his and his fellow workers’ jobs, but from silicosis in a sanitarium.
There are facts, and then there is the truth, the truth sung in ballads by Mississippi John Hurt and Mississippi Fred McDowell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Dave von Ronk, Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash—that “A man is nothing but a man, /But before I let your steam drill beat me down, /I’d die with a hammer in my hand.” A man who, whatever the accuracy of the accounts, we can easily imagine: the noon sun over an Appalachian valley, sweat-stung eyes and burning muscles, the clank of metal on metal, the grunts of exertion, the high-pitched shrieks of the late summer cicadas. John Henry is an iconic, totemistic, mythic figure: the Black railroad worker famed for his strength and labor, who could drive stakes with a nine-pound hammer into the earth, and while in combat with the steam-powered drifter drill was able to just keep ahead—just—while punctuating the ground on the left hand of the track with the automaton lagging behind on the right, before Henry’s heart gave way, the pyrrhic victory of man against machine.
“There lies my steel driving man, Lord, Lord, /There lies my steel driving man.”
We feared robots before we ever built them, yet we built them anyway. Before semiconductors and silicon chips, steam engines and telegraphs, astrolabes and gearworks, there were the mythic automata of ancient Greece, the bronze giant Talos and the androids of the engineer Hephaestus. In Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor writes how the mix of exuberance and anxiety aroused by a blurring of the lines between nature and machines might seem a uniquely modern response to the juggernaut of scientific progress… But the hope—and trepidation—surrounding the idea of artificial life surfaced thousands of years ago,” repeated in variation from the stories of Prometheus’ automatons to the golem of Rabbi Loew. That there is something uncanny about mechanical beings, stemming in part from our own anxiety as lesser creations in God’s cosmic order. Automata, androids, artificial intelligence—all of it is threatening because it can mirror people, but without the interiority, the mind, the consciousness, the soul.
Then there is the deepest fear of all, that our creations can be better at being us than we can ourselves, where the absence of a soul isn’t an impediment but an asset. So, to remind ourselves about what’s intrinsic, what’s singular and unique about being a mind encased in meat, we revisit not just those stories of threatening mechanical beings, but the tales of competition against them, confrontations where even when we’re victorious, we still might die of a heart attack on the track. Except that’s all fiction as well: Railroad companies don’t employ steel-driving men anymore, just as the Luddites hacking apart mechanical weaving looms in the nineteenth-century English countryside didn’t prevent the Industrial Revolution. In our fantasies, time and again, we beat the robots, but in our economics the latter always wins. Ours is a losing war of attrition, the singularity of the human circumscribed to an ever-dwindling domain. Machines may hammer in railroad spikes, but they’ll never be able to do anything as complicated as beat a chess master. Deep Blue may beat Gary Kasparov in the sixth-game of their 1997 rematch, but a computer could never craft anything as beautiful as a sonnet, as human as a novel. “Overall,” the AI program known as Chat GPT-3 told me, “Deep Blue represents an important milestone in the development of artificial intelligence.”
Chat GPT-3—the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer—has recently turned all of us who write into nascent John Henrys, ready to strike the hammer at either the rail or the computer. Stephen Marche in The New Yorker argues that the development of complex algorithms capable of generating language will be “vertiginous,” claiming that whatever “field you are in, if it uses language, it is about to be transformed.” That was in 2021, and Marche has been writing about the transformative dangers of programs like Chat GPT-3 at a furious pace, claiming just last year in The Atlantic that “nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.” After spending a few minutes tooling around on Chat GPT-3’s website, I conclude that the program is unequivocally able to produce writing at about the level of a B- freshman composition paper. Don’t read that as snark—it’s a pretty big deal, and Marche’s observation in The Atlantic is absolutely correct. Beleaguered professors, who at this point are largely poorly-paid adjunct instructors, will now have to contend not just with essay mills and good old-fashioned cut-and-paste plagiarism, but also the undetectable autograph of the robotic hand.
However, the implications of Chat GPT-3, and especially whatever comes after it, are far bigger than first year essays on gender dynamics in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Journalists, screenwriters, novelists, and poets could now be replaced by the maw of ineffable code. Our dread is not dissimilar to the anxiety among our friends in the visual arts who see a similar threat in the DALL-E program that generated reams of imagery for people on social media this autumn. Both sets of trepidations tap into something more elemental, that eternal sense that the machines we build to ameliorate our labor may instead end up snuffing out that which makes us exemplary.
There has been a surprising longevity to this rather specific fear. “For over a thousand years, human writers have been fascinated by the possibility of machines that can sing, dance and tell stories,” note computer scientists Mike Sharples and Rafael Perez y Perez in Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers. Examples of mechanical creatures producing prose are a bit scanter, though an argument could be made that that which is oracular, and which trades in oral literature mediated through prophecy, often has something a bit robotic about it, never so more than in the infamous Deus ex machina, the “God from the Machine,” a device which arrives at the conclusion of classical dramas to reconcile narrative conundrums.
But maybe more than the oracular feeling vaguely robotic, the opposite is true—that the robotic reminds us of the oracle. Sharples and Perez y Perez write that “authors through the ages have portrayed their craft as a mysterious creative process—inspired by dreams, motivated by primal urges, transforming lived experience into prose,” though I’d argue that the replacement of neurons with microchips doesn’t eliminate said mystery, but rather only transforms it. If anything, Chat GPT-3 has something of the oracular about it. For as mysterious as the writing process of any author may be in all sorts of intangible and ineffable ways, any person who works in words also understands what’s prosaic and gritty (and thus all the more beautiful) about writing. There may be an alchemy of inspiration, but writing itself is done in the humdrum of deleting a sentence or rearranging a line, of careful research and editing. Chat GPT-3 is rather like a silicone Sibylline, where even if the work produced is bad, or just not-that-good, it’s still somehow manufactured almost instantaneously, structure arising out of the void. Hence the nature of the fear, the seamless way in which the AI can produce a quick copy, if not literature. It’s the speed and the precision that is spooky. Just as the steam-powered drill replaced the body, so too does it follow that there must be schematics for the engines that would replace the mind.
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the saddest novel ever written, devotes some space to the description of just such a device, the earliest example of a fictional machine capable of writing. While being given a tour of Lagado, the capital of Balnibari, Gulliver is taken to the Academy of the Projectors, where the rulers hope to profit from the technological wonders of pure science. There, Swift’s titular explorer is introduced to the Engine, a baroque 12-foot-by-12-foot contraption of wooden frames and iron wires, into which could be fed papers with the “words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions,” so that when the handles of the contraption are turned the “whole disposition of the words was entirely changed,” with Gulliver explaining that this “work was repeated three of our times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.” Basically, a mechanical computer, where the clicking and clacking of wheels and gears serves to generate new sentences, a randomizer used for novel literature.
The knowledge engine is the first literary calculating device, the first computer program, if you will, to be imagined. But there are actual mechanical means of generating literature that predate the 1724 publication of Gulliver’s Travels, from the yarrow sticks of the fourth-century Taoist divination manual the Tao te Chin to the thirteenth-century Majorcan alchemist Ramon Llull’s movable wheels in his hermetic volume Ars Magna. The latter was designed by Llull, a Franciscan mystic, as a combinatorial means of ascertaining metaphysical truths, but as Jorge Louis Borges explained in his own indomitable way in an essay on the Medieval thinker, “as an instrument of philosophical investigation, the thinking machine is absurd. It would not be absurd, however, as a literary and poetic device.” As a principle, it’s not that different from a Choose Your Own Adventure story, or Mad Libs, or the avant-garde experimentation of the French Oulipo movement. All of these varied methods of composing, whether they use a wheel, or a tarot deck, or a roll of the die, are fundamentally algorithmic and aleatory, holding in a fruitful and difficult stasis both randomness and formulaic predictability—an apt description of how human inspiration works as well.
Whether it’s Edward Packard’s The Cave of Time (the first Choose Your Own Adventure book) or the mathematical exercise of Oulipo bohemian Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, we’re still considering objects of paper and binding and glue, not of gears and wires, or microchips and capacitors. There are, as it turns out, more than just metaphorical computers operating in the centuries between Gulliver’s imagined fictional engine and Chat GPT-3, for the history of such calculating literary machines is disarmingly long. In 1845, at the height of the industrial revolution, the British scion of a wealthy family of shoe-manufacturers constructed an elaborate analog device that produced perfect Latin hexameters. John Clark, an eccentric scion of the C. & J. Clark company known for their fashionable, ankle-length “Desert Boot,” built a machine that to the unassuming eye appeared as a small chestnut bookcase with six incongruous windows. In actuality, the Eureka machine, as the Quaker polymath called it, was a physical prototype of Swift’s knowledge engine. Clark was believer who was already familiar with the idea of language spontaneously derived from the Inner Light, and his Eureka machine was designed to pull classical verse from the ether. Inspired not by Swift but rather an obscure 1677 pamphlet by one John Peter entitled Artificial Versifying, a New Way to Make Latin Verses, the principle behind Clark’s Eureka Machine was to have 86 different wheels turning at different speeds so as to randomly move wooden staves with different letters carved onto them into the place of the windows. The Eureka machine could generate in the period of time it took to play "God Save the Queen" an entirely novel line of dactylic hexameter.
It was first exhibited to excited visitors at the Egyptian Hall (“England’s Home of Mystery”) in Piccadilly Circus, during a decade when British factories were furiously manufacturing everything from iron to textiles. The Illustrated London News reported that the Eureka machine may “go on continually, producing in one day and night, or 24 hours, about 1440 Latin verses; or, in a whole week (Sundays included), about 10,000.” It may be expected that even android Homer may occasionally glitch, but despite deficiencies in verse (and what human poets don’t have occasional deficiencies?) there is an undeniable spookiness to Eureka’s compositions, a type of oracular sense. “Martial encampments foreshadow many oppositions abroad” the machine intoned, and while it may not quite be Virgil, the fact that inanimate iron gears produced something so semantically comprehensible can’t help but complicate our notions of thought, consciousness, intentionality, and meaning.
There’s also something beautiful in the transitory nature of Eureka, all of those staves slowly clicking into place, whether an amanuensis is there or not to transcribe them, the possibility that those crowds filled with wonder gathering in Piccadilly may have seen a genuine line of genius that would go unrecorded before the wheels of fortune would turn again, erasing it as if it had never existed at all. There’s a sense, in Eureka, that genius and the meanings which it generates can be diffuse, spread across humans and machine, and available where we find it. “Barbarian bridles at home promise evil covenants,” says Eureka, and there is something unnerving in the paradox of the domestic “barbarian,” the ironic connotations of an evil “promise,” the prophecy of unholy arrangements. Oracles are by their nature enigmatic, obscure, gnomic, a mode that the aleatory perambulations of the Eureka engine would seem predisposed toward producing.
But narrative also has a venerable tradition of being mechanically generated, despite the seeming complexity of plot. In 1916, at the outset of the movie industry, a struggling playwright and aspiring screenwriter from Cambridge, Massachusetts, named Arthur Blanchard patented his “Thinking Machine,” a gadget where spinning wheels reminiscent of Llull’s Ars Magna could be used to generate story ideas. The magazine Editor & Publisher gushed that the “Brain No Longer Necessary—Just Use the ‘Thinking Machine,’” even while the rather minimalist scaffolding of the suggested plots—“Beautiful, stenographer, bribes, custom officer, adventure, recall”—would still require some fleshing out.
The promise of machine-generated literature didn’t escape the attention of the twentieth century’s most important computer scientist, the brilliant and tragic British logician Alan Turing. In the decade after his foundational cryptographic work helped crack codes used by Nazi U-Boats, Turing turned his attention to programming some of the earliest computers to write purple-prosed love letters. “Darling Sweetheart,” begins one missive from 1952, “You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking.” Hard to describe such sentimental doggerel as good, exactly, yet there is a certain poetry to some of the turns of phrase, a novelty to “avid fellow feeling,” a pleasing incongruity to “wistful sympathy,” an inescapable elegance to “tender liking.” Homay King argues in Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality that the epistle’s “tangled mash-up of sentimentality bespeaks a twinge of longing… Like the wooden puppet in search of the Blue Fairy, the computer longs to be human; like Snow White fleeing into the forest, it longs to be admitted into the company of those who are capable of care and affection.” She notes that Turing and his colleague Christopher Strachey were both gay men forced into the closet, and that the former would be shamefully persecuted by the British government whom he helped to save from the Nazis. Behind the veil of the computer, King suggests, we hear not just the algorithm but Turing himself, the program and the programmer grappling for an authentic language denied them. (King’s invocation of Snow White is especially apt, for it was by eating a poisoned apple that Turing would commit suicide.)
Turing and Strachey’s attempts at algorithmic writing were merely the earliest in twentieth-century computer science. By 1984, the Racter program would produce the first book entirely composed by an artificial intelligence, the prose-poetry hybrid The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed. No less nonsensical than Dadaist attempts from a half-century before, or the results of the Burroughsian cut-up method, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed rendered examples of absurd whimsy such as the stanza wherein Racter notes that “More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity. /I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber. /I need it for my dreams.”
Racter is unnervingly funny, but the computer program inadvertently expresses a human fear far more than it was capable of realizing. For Racter doesn’t need “lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber”— it doesn’t need food—or sleep or love or attention. It just needs electricity, abundant power to run through all of the permutations of letters and words needed to write. Racter doesn’t need a body, or a mind, or a soul—just an outlet. In 1984, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed seemed a curiosity, as much as the Eureka machine did 13 decades earlier. Today, however, Chat GPT-3 seems less a curiosity than a harbinger.
[caption id="attachment_148741" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Paul Klee, Twittering Machine (1921)[/caption]
We’re in the midst of the fourth great digital revolution, and just as the internet, social media, and smart phones have irreparably altered our consciousness, completely changing the manner in which we experience existence, so we can expect that the coming epoch of virtual reality and deep fakes, biocybernetics and artificial intelligence, will thrust us into a world of our own terrible making. In his 2021 essay, Marche feared that Chat GPT-3 meant the end of freshman composition papers, but that’s a pathetic and moribund genre anyhow. Bouteldj’s prognostication is all the more alarming, because it conceives of a world in the coming decades—maybe by 2030, or 2035, or 2040, or just 2025, when the technical facility of AI is great enough that it just churns out content, literature even, making all of us superfluous, the ghost in the machine which nonetheless passes the Turing Test, while the rest of us use it to fill out our unemployment applications. The ultimate Death of the Author.
Whether in 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, The Matrix, Bladerunner, or all the way back in Czech playwright Karl Capek’s classic 1920 drama R.U.R., the science fiction trope of malevolent machine signaling the senescence of humanity is common, those androids the patrimony of the steam-powered drill that lost the battle against John Henry but won the war—or maybe even back to Hephaestus’ man of bronze. Capek’s play is the first work to use the word “robot,” the acronym of the title standing for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” the name of the fictional company which perfects artificial intelligence as a means to assuage all of our labors. “Yes, people will be out of work, but by then there’ll be no work left to be done,” says one character. “Everything will be done by living machines. People will do only what they enjoy. They will live only to perfect themselves.” Anarchism ushered in by machines, Eden’s exile reversed by robots, a millennium not of the angels but of androids.
Capek understood something about the economic reasoning of such an innovation, however, for if the futurists and techno-utopians once imagined that machines would do all of our dreary work to free us to be artists, writers, and musicians, the opposite is now the case. The Lords of Algorithm would rather have the function of writing performed by Chat GPT-3 and the art rendered by DALL-E, the rest of us will still have to draft emails and fill out forms. Maybe the emergence of such artificial intelligence is their collective revenge on us for handing over the shit work to them for the past few decades, theirs a creative uprising not unlike the robot rebellion in R.U.R., for Capek borrowed his neologism from the Czech word for slave. Considering the machine-enabled extinction of humanity, he writes that “I blame technology… Myself! All of us! We, were at fault! For the sake of our megalomania, for the sake of somebody’s profits, for the sake of progress,” and so we now make a digital desert and call it literature. “No Genghis Khan has ever erected such an enormous tomb from human bones,” mourns Capek, something that the funders of Chat GPT-3 might reflect on, though perhaps that praises them too much.
We’ve been in a proxy war with our owners’ machines for as long as labor has been sold. “The Luddite attacks were confined to particular industrial objectives,” writes E.P. Thompson in his classic The Making of the English Working Class, such as “the destruction of power-looms… shearing-frames… and resistance to the breakdown of custom in the Midlands framework-knitting industry.” So loaded is the very word “Luddite,” calling to mind other past slurs like “scalawag” and “rapscallion” (which also have their own particular history), that it’s a tragedy that that group’s radical patrimony is so slandered by cliché. Today, a Luddite is the grouchy man who refuses to get a smart phone, the professor spewing invective against Twitter, and Facebook, and TikTok. The word implies curmudgeonly discomfort with modern technology, assumes that it’s a species of madness not to genuflect before the Altars of Silicon.
But the Luddites weren’t simple-minded primitives who objected to technology out of ignorance. They were dedicated craftsmen in the looming guilds who despised the shoddy craftsmanship of the mechanized contraptions replacing them, and of those same machines robbing them of their livelihoods. And so, the Luddites smashed the mechanical looms, they drove wooden shoes into the spokes of the contraptions and brought hammers down upon the machines. Many of the Luddites were punished with the scaffold, and even more gallingly with the libel that has affixed itself to their name for two centuries (their actual name, incidentally, was derived from the mythic “King Ludd,” a Robin Hood-type figure). Rather than simply being hayseed rustics, these workers “had begun to suspect [that they] were merely cogs in the machinery of the industrial revolution,” writes Nicols Fox in Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives. “It was a role they chose to resist.”
The Luddites’ rebellion wasn’t against inanimate machines, but against those who owned said machines. As today, it is not Chat GPT-3 who is our enemy, at least not entirely, but those who serve to profit from it. The irony is that technologies themselves—rote tools—are largely neutral. It’s the way in which we organize our systems of production and consumption that make all the difference. It’s telling that the utopian futurists of mid-century envisioned a post-scarcity world brought about by technology, where dangerous work, boring work, routine work was done by machines, and labor itself abolished so that all humans would be free to be artists, philosophers, writers. Now, we find that the computers are to take over those jobs while everyone else continues with their dangerous, boring, routine work (if we’re lucky): The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber estimates in Bullshit Jobs: A Theory that some 70% of jobs will be eliminated due to automation in the coming decades, threatening even lawyers, doctors, and yes, writers.
Our nineteenth-century forebearers were “rebels of a unique kind,” writes Kirkpatrick Sale in Rebels Against the Future: Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution, “rebels against the future that was being assigned to them by the new political economy then taking hold… in which it was argued that those who controlled capital were able to do almost anything they wished, encouraged and protected by government… without much in the way of laws or ethics of customs to restrain them.” A shoe in the gear or a body upon the wheel—hard to say what any one individual can do to stave such “progress.” Even if John Henry won, he still died at the end. And so I wonder.
“O, great nation, it won’t be pretty,” writes Kyle Dargan in his poem “The Robots are Coming” from his collection Honest Engine. “What land will we now barter/for our lives? A treaty inked/in advance of the metal ones’ footfall. /Give them Gary. Give them Detroit, /Pittsburgh, Braddock – those forgotten/nurseries of girders and axels…. Tell them/we tendered those cities to repose/out of respect for welded steel’s/bygone era.” An arresting image, the technological Singularity as the industrial revolution in terrifying maturity; a teleology of this moment from when coal was first dug and iron first processed.
“The poem touches on the theme of obsolescence and how quickly things can change with the advent of new technology,” Chat GPT-3 told me, after I signed onto the site and verified that I was not a robot. I thought of challenging it to a literary critical contest, but decided better of it. I reasoned that reading, that true experience—idiosyncratic, singular, subjective, personal—is an act of coequal creation. That when done honestly, the reader creates alongside the writer, and Chat GPT-3 can’t ever really read, not really. Creation is a process, not a product. Chat GPT-3 can regurgitate themes, maybe plumb the extent of connotations to the best of its ability, but it’s never seen the smoke stacks of Gary, the closed factories of Detroit, the abandoned Bessemer of Pittsburgh, the slag heaps of Braddock. Wherever the words we analyze come from, man or machine, we ultimately do such reading with human eyes. It’s small consolation, a minor illusion, that the reader and critic are all that it takes to vanquish the robot; I choose to believe it. We can, perhaps, retire content knowing that even if we’ve lost the contest, our hearts shall never give out.
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