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A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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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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