It’s a book that����praised, stating “the novel’s dream logic is as intoxicating as the secluded setting. Readers will eagerly turn the pages of this beguiling literary thriller.” And none other than Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu claimed��Of Beasts and Fowls��is “the most haunting [novel] I have read in years.”

To celebrate this release (the first of two Adón books we’re doing), we’re offering a for the rest of the month. (No checkout code required, U.S. purchases only.)

And to entice you further into this witchy, captivating novel, below you’ll find an excerpt from when Coro arrives at Bethany and has her first interaction with it’s inhabitants.

Also: Sign up for the for more insights into how this book came to be, how it’s being reviewed, and other news from Open Letter. (And an easily accessible way to listen to this conversation with Pilar.)

She’d put a cotton jacket on over her T-shirt, foregoing the summer raincoat she kept in the backseat. If she had to sleep in the car, she would use it as a blanket.

Once she had a handle on the scene—the black fence and the vegetation that grew up around it, the stone walls bordering the lane—she zipped up her jacket and switched on the overhead light. From her purse, she took out a handkerchief embroidered with the letter C and her sketchbook. Maybe there was a security camera on the fence, pointing down at her. Her fixed image at the center of a monitor. Wide-eyed. She was going to write that she needed help on a piece of paper and put it on the windshield, in case somebody, somewhere, could read it. And she was going to draw using the dashboard for support. It was the only thing that would calm her right then, while she got used to the idea that this thing was happening to her. She had actually gotten lost. Her fingers were cold, but she opened the sketchbook and leaned on the dashboard. That’s when she saw that someone was approaching the gate with a flashlight.

“What are you doing here?” The stranger addressed her with the formal you.

She found it odd that a stranger would ask her the exactly same thing she’d been asking herself.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

She rolled down the window.

“I’m lost,” she said.

“What are you looking for? Are you looking for something?”

“I’m running out of gas. I need to know if there’s a gas station somewhere nearby.”

“Are you wanting a house? What do you want? To rent or buy?”

She heard.

“I’m lost. Can you help me?”

“People love coming around here. They’re attracted to the scenery.”

Coro put the handkerchief in her purse and got out of the car.

The woman was opening the gate.

“I just need to turn around and get back to the main highway, but I can’t move with all those planks on the ground. And I’m not sure if I have enough gas. Do you know if nearby . . .”

“It’s not easy to get here. Where do you live?”

The woman drew closer and pointed the flashlight right at her face. She shut her eyes.

“Don’t do that. Please.”

“You’re not from around here.”

She wasn’t going to repeat that she was lost.

“There’s nothing for sale in the area. It’s even worse the closer you get to the mountain. You have to turn around, go back to the flatlands. There are more houses there. More properties.”

“You’re mistaken. I don’t want to buy anything.”

“Then why are you here?”

Coro looked inside the car, still illuminated by the overhead light. Her purse. Her things.

“I’m running out of gas.”

“You’ve said that already.”

For a second, she thought the best thing would be to be clutching the steering wheel again. To put a piece of gum or candy in her mouth. Her breath probably stank.

“Do you have a car? Maybe we could take some gas from your tank and put it in mine. I’ve seen it done, you suck it through a tube.”

The woman shined the flashlight in her face again.

“What’s your name? What’s your surname? I’m not bringing a stranger to my house.”

“I just need a little gas.”

“Have you come alone?”

The woman inspected the inside of the car, the backseat, and asked again what her name was and if she had come there alone.

“I better go. I’ll try to turn around.”

“I think it’s reasonable to want to know the name of the person who has just plunked herself down on my doorstep at this time of night.”

“It wasn’t intentional. I’m telling you.”

She got into the car. The flashlight was right back in her eyes again.

“Come on. Come with me. We’re going to try this tube thing. We have two cars down below.”

The woman said to follow her.

“I don’t want to bother anyone.”

The woman would go on foot and Coro would follow, behind the wheel. That’s what she proposed.

“It’s downhill. It’s fine.”

“Listen . . . Why don’t you bring your car up here?”

“I’m telling you, it’s downhill.”

“And if we don’t know how to transfer the fuel between tanks? Then I won’t be able to get back up.”

“You want gas, don’t you?”

She thought for a second.

�Ԩ���.”

“Well, come on.”

She started the car.

Very slowly, she began to follow the woman, staring at the bright spot of the flashlight leading the way, pointed at the ground. Down a dirt lane toward a house that emerged on the left after several minutes, and which appeared covered in the leaves or branches of several trees. Facing a potholed slope and enveloped in a darkness she wouldn’t know how to get out of.

The woman motioned for her to go even slower.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, coming over to the window.

“I just need a little gas. You wouldn’t have a can, would you?”

“You’re going to have to get out of there.”

At that point in the night, she was exhausted. She only just realized she had been breathing through her mouth for some time.

Waving her arms, the woman indicated where she should park, under a tree, where there were two other cars. Coro sighed and tried to calm herself. That woman was going to lend her a hand. She really was going to help her.

“Do you like the house? They say it was built by a single man.”

Just then, the lights came on in the first-floor windows and someone turned on a fluorescent outdoor bulb that completely illuminated the front of the house with an extraordinary white light.

“Some think all the lights should be left on, to discourage burglars. But I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s better if they don’t know we’re here.”

Coro couldn’t see her face because the woman had positioned herself against the light. She could see, however, that another woman was coming out of the house, headed in their direction, carrying something. Five or six dogs also appeared, circling Coro and sniffing her.

“You’re not afraid of dogs, are you?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

The vagueness of the sky against the excessive light from the fluorescent bulb acted almost like a cupola. The place looked like a stage surrounded by trees.

“I’ve just taken it off the fire. Be careful.” The second woman handed Coro a mug, and she accepted it. It was scalding. It scorched her fingers. Her first impulse was to drop it. But she contained herself.

“C������ڳܱ�.”

“Shit!” she exclaimed.

The woman who gave her the mug made no expression whatsoever.

“Watch that mouth,” said the other.

“It’s boiling.”

She looked around for somewhere to set it down. In the company of those two women who watched her.

In an exercise of maximum self-control, after what seemed like hours, she set the mug on the hood of her car, spilling some of the liquid.

“Bring it here. I’ll hold it for you.”

“It’s boiling.”

“I warned you.”

“Nobody could drink that.”

“I warned you. We’ll wait until it cools.”

A nozzle hung from the side of the house, lit by the fluorescent bulb, fastened to the wall by a pipe and dripping a few centimeters from the bottom of a stone basin.

“Can I get some water?” she asked.

“It doesn’t work. Just drips.”

Coro brought her hands to mouth with the sensation that they were on fire. She went to the faucet and tried to turn it, but it was stuck.

“It doesn’t turn on or off. We told you.”

She brought her hands to her mouth again. They would be covered in blisters. She let the drops from the faucet wet her skin. She had hurt herself in the attempt to turn the lever and now her fingers shook.

A hoe and a rake were propped against the wall, beside the basin. And a wheelbarrow. The two women approached in silence, and when she turned around, she found them right behind her, fully illuminated by the fluorescent bulb. One had incredibly light brown eyes, almost golden, and the pair looked older now than she’d first imagined. They were slim and limber. They wore their hair pulled back and the same clothes, with identical boots. The same fabric for a pair of dresses equally threadbare and equally wrinkled. The woman who’d come from inside had put on a shawl.

Over their heads an immense tree grew. Carob, they told her.

“Can we try for the gas?” she asked.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to come inside? Sit down and have a drink?”

“You’re not going to help me?”

“We are helping you.”

Coro looked at the dogs still circling her. Coming and going. Peeing on the flowerpots. At the base of the tree hugging the trunk, ringing it, a row of bowls, cups, and tin cans were tied together with string and containing water and scraps.

“For the cats.”

“They get on well with the dogs.”

Coro couldn’t care less whether or not they got on. Whether they ripped each other apart or ate each other up. Whether they tore out their eyes or chewed off hunks of flesh.

“What’s wrong? You’re not afraid of us, are you? You’re the one who turned up at our gate.”

“You made me drive down here.”

“If you’re looking for property, it’s better to see it during the day. The land. The lake.”

“I told you, I’m lost.”

“Right, but no one gets lost around here.”

“Do you think the broth will have cooled by now?” the first woman asked the second.

“Not broth, milk.”

“Do you like milk? Everyone likes milk, don’t they?”

“What’s your name?”

She answered and the women laughed.

“Coro? What kind of name is that? Where are you from?”

They told her the name didn’t exist and she thought that she should get back in the car. She always had that option. That blessed option. Only then would she be calmer. Getting into the car and locking the doors. Staying inside.

“You don’t want to come in?”

The two women watched her.

“You’re obviously tired.”

“Here. Drink.”

They handed her the mug again. Firmly. Coro brought it indecisively to her lips, but she drank. All of it. Asking herself how she could be there. How had she been able to leave her phone at home. What was happening to her.

It was still hot.

“Better? You feel better, don’t you?”

Did she feel better?

“Come on, relax a bit.”

“Do you want to come in?”

��by Pilar Adón & Katie Whittemore is available from (30% off before 12/1/24), , and better bookstores everywhere!

It’s been a while since there’s been a full-on screed here at Three Percent, but I’m��infuriated��that not only is this article�� getting some level of social media traction (people I truly respect have sent this to me, or written about it, but I feel like they haven’t read it, which is another sort of thinkpiece some blowhard wannabe pundit can pick up on), but that it was published in the first place.

Let’s start with the premise: College professors have noticed that college students at “elite” universities have trouble finishing complete books because in high school they have “never been required to read an entire book.” They are “assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.” As a result, professors at Columbia have to trim their classes because these students can’t handle the reading load, and, presumably, culture is going down the shitter as a result. Horowitch: “To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read��The Iliad—all of it.”

This argument is a perfect exemplar of today’s op-ed obsessed content economy: is it true? WHO KNOWS! But does it��sound��plausible? Does it give you something to rail against? FOR SURE. It’s Thanksgiving dinner fodder: “Kids sure are dumb these days. They can’t even read all of��Crime and Punishment!” (“Generally, they only read ‘Crime'” is the most appropriate response.)

Let’s put aside the bad faith nature of Horowitch’s argument for a minute—and the question as to whether or not finishing War and Peace or The Iliad makes a discernible difference in one’s life, accomplishments, abilities—and just look at her��research. Because, if you’re going to make a claim that “students can’t read books cover-to-cover anymore,” then you��must��have some watertight data about reading trends comparing say, students in each decade from the 1950s till today, or even over the past twenty years, perhaps with an emphasis on reading stamina (we’re not even talking about��comprehension, just the “ability” to read a book from start to finish, from page one till FIN) as impacted by the pandemic.

Well, because this is the fucking��Atlantic, you shouldn’t be surprised that data is not only negligible, the totality of it exists in one of the squishiest evidentiary statements I’ve ever seen in print:

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences.

“No comprehensive data,” “majority of,” “similar experiences” = must be true!

Holy shit this is such bad reasoning. I don’t even have to pull the “small sample size” card for this one . . . Although, I do want to point out that NOT A SINGLE STUDENT was interviewed for this piece. Instead, it’s all anecdotal stuff that professors would say at a cocktail party for laughs and so that everyone could commiserate over how “teaching is so much harder now, because students are dumber.” Ah yes, we’re martyrs for Great Literature! Fighting the good fight against . . . smartphones?

After an anecdote from the chair of Georgetown’s English department about how students have “trouble staying focused on even a sonnet”:

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in the reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing.

“Smartphones are distracting” is the weakest explanatory argument I can imagine for why college students don’t finish novels. Not only are smartphones distracting to everyone, young or old, book readers or not, but using this as the��only��proposed explanation for this “problem” (which, again, may not be even true—there is no data) in the face of many others is the sort of argumentative mistake I would ding in an essay from one of my freshman students. Maybe the texts being assigned are truly boring? (1000% I’m checking sports scores instead of reading a sonnet.) Maybe students are truly overburdened by assignments in STEM classes? Maybe they finish a dozen unassigned books a semester, just not War and Peace?

That last flippant comment for why students don’t read every line of The Iliad��actually points to what I think Horowitch is truly concerned about: It’s not that students don’t read books cover to cover, it’s that they don’t read the��right��books.

This is actually evidenced in “” by Carrie M. Santos-Thomas, a high school teacher who was interviewed by Horowitch for this piece.

As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing��Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system, my colleagues and I have developed professional toolboxes with endless other ways to inspire our students to read about justice, compassion, and redemption. [. . .]

Ishmael Beah’s��A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s��American Street, and David Bowles’s��The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. Frustratingly, despite the numerous examples I provided of students reading books cover-to-cover in my class, Horowitch opted to include only the unit that, like the original rhapsodes of the bronze age, I excerpt and abridge.

Here’s what Horowitch said about Santos-Thomas:

One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s��Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.)

Again, the logic of this paragraph—used to be structured around books, but now the��Odyssey��unit includes music and TED Talks—is so flimsy that, again, I would push back on a freshman who included this in a paper. (And that’s not to take shots at freshman; of the 33 freshman I’ve taught, “the majority” could write papers of “similar quality” to Horowitch’s “article.”)

I can’t let this rant hit its natural stopping point without pointing out the classism that’s both implicit in the article’s title (“oh the elite students can’t read! Clutching my pearls!”), and explicitly classist shit delineated below:

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

Yeah, those kids at community colleges and “nonselective universities” (gross) might not even be literate, so of course they can’t finish a book. But what about the future leaders of our country graduating from places like Yale! Which, of course, is where Horowitch went to . . . quite recently in fact.

At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

To be specific, Horowitch got her BA in History in May 2023. You wouldn’t know it given the agist hand-wringing she’s trafficking in, but again, The Atlantic��is the worst magazine in America. Too bad they’re so concerned about students flipping pages from beginning to end, and not about being able to publish actually researched journalism.

A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his��Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin,and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River.Hisson,still a child,sitsat the foot of the bed, attentively collectingthesefinal,hallucinated words.

Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time,and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—h������asits source this ultimate paternal legacy?

Questioning the intricacies of fiction, which constantly oscillatesbetween reality and imagination, Rodrigo Fresán’sapproaches the enigma of the literary vocation in a new light.��An invented biography, a gothic novel populated by ghosts,and an evocation of a filial love,��Melvill��contains all the talent, humor, and immense culture found in the other great works from one of Spanish literature’s most ambitious writers.

If you enjoy what you read below, you can from now until midnight PT on October 31st. (U.S. residents only, discount applied automatically at checkout.)

*

Now he knows he’s surrounded by everyone and everything, but he feels more alone than ever. Here, the perfect solitude of one outside but with no way out. Freezing but soon to burn, the fire of a fever already rising inside him. Speaking in smoldering, scorching tongues: sparking words that flame and name, far away and foreign to any warmth of home, to that home he’s dying—and where he’ll die—to return to.

Ready to be one more among so many memories. Wanting to be remembered like this. Epic in defeat. Broken but stronger than ever because there’s nothing left to break inside of him. Nothing to hide, all’s been revealed. All of him to everyone. Exposed to all and after all.

His name pronounced (mispronounced, emphasis on the ultimate syllable, foreignizing, Frenchifying it, making it more removed and, perhaps in that way, worthier of greater rejection) with a combination of shame and condemnation.

His name before a jury that would never dare find for him and, prejudging, would reach a unanimous verdict: “Young Wastrel of a Patrician Family,” and that’s the way—all-caps when written and��italics when spoken—people write about him in letters and speak about him at balls and banquets and masses.

Thus, his sentence to be served posthaste with no possibility of appeal or pardon. But here he is, still begging for someone to at least testify on his behalf and to write his story and to put him into words and, in a way, if not justify him then at least give him a modicum of redemption, a modicum of significance and purpose and reason to exist.

To be written.[1]

To be a being written (him being someone who more than once wished and dreamed he could write it all down and is already ready to transfer the acquittal of such a sentence) on empty and frozen pages like the waters he’s walking across now, barely keeping warm with the breathless breathing of dead supplications and unheard prayers. Messianic and miraculous, yes; but not like the Omnipotent and triumphant Creator on high but like a deity plummeting from higher still, in free fall, prisoner and fallen in his disgrace. His once divine voice no longer commanding, deafening, proof of love and respect but, trembling and weak, dwindling until it becomes a silent and flashing sacrifice he makes to himself. And, meanwhile, as he prepares his own execution ceremony, asking himself, without an answer, why (wasn’t this a distinctive trait of mortals? that almost last and willful gift of your whole life summarized in seconds and in reverse so you could understand it better or not bother? wasn’t that the explanation of the mystery of why so many people died with a Momma, Mommy, Ma on their lips?) all the people and things of this world that he loves or that don’t love him, the whole history of his story, now seemed to converge in this white darkness. Darkness he advances through, previously opaque and obscure and so late, suddenly without time and as if untethered from time, forever and ever, implacable and clean and transparent.

*

Record and file it, even if you prefer not to:

It’s the night of Saturday, December 10th, 1831, and Allan Melvill walks across the frozen waters of the Hudson River.

*

And, oh, when you walk on ice, on water in suspended animation, moods shift and thoughts are thought differently, Allan Melvill thinks. He thinks about how thoughts are thought with the most burning coolness. He thinks about how you think of anything other than that which, once deemed unthinkable, is, as such, impossible not to think about: about how that ice could break and about how, then, sinking to never again rise back up to that surface of superficialities to be ignored or attended to, you would cease to think forever. He thinks about the cold that freezes into crystals that bind together and break apart to separate and rise into the sky to then fall on the living and the dead in always different shapes.[2] With that cold that forces you to close your eyes to discover that, like certain lizards, you can see through your eyelids: his now almost sliced off by the freezing blade of the wild wind that whips his hair into disarray.

The same thing would happen (Allan Melvill thinks now, like he’s never thought before, thinking about what would be thought about or about what one would never dare to think about again but that, in the act refusing, one thinks about, thinking about how he once thought, afloat in a damning floating city of the damned) when we find a way to remain aloft, airborne and truly and joyfully displaced. When man can fly aboard marvelous machines (not just aerostatic balloons) whose sound will be like that of thousands of men clearing their throats after the morning’s first pipe. And with and in those machines, battles will be waged among the stars, and they’ll even make it to that fleeting moon, which, at this very moment, the clouds cover and uncover only to cover it again, and hurl down almost merciful white flakes of snow on Allan Melvill, as if they were soldiers laying siege to that defeated and humiliated deserter of the crucifying crusade of his own life.

But we’ve got a long way to go before that. Now, beneath his feet, that ice is the only solid thing left to hold him up, while around him and above him everything is thin ice in suspense, and the important thing is not to fly but to keep from falling or sinking or drowning.

Thus, in the dark, Allan Melvill remembers first; but then it’s as if he were dreaming, as if he were dreaming himself, or seeing himself from above. And he’d read somewhere that people who lived and wandered through landscapes of endless ices often felt that someone, their doppelgänger, was walking beside them (like that vanquished and enslaved memento-mori walking beside a triumphant Caesar or other victorious generals) and whispering in their ear the more than fifty names snow can be given, but not the names for each and every one of the infinite and always-different flakes that make up that snow and that, first, give the shape of snow to whatever they happen to come to rest upon and, then, to all the shapes they take after giving shape to the snow.

Then, suddenly, to the surprise and wonder of Allan Melvill, his whole life (his life as a father) is lived and relived, it melts away only to resolidify, like an invention invented by the boy who, though he would never theretofore have imagined it, has turned out to be the most inventive and imaginative of his children.[3]

[1] But no, not yet. It will be years before that happens: the sad masquerade of my father (there’s no need for me to wait for the revelations of a future yet-to-be-revealed science that will be dedicated to the interpretation of dreams and daydreams) rewritten wearing different masks like that of a riverway conman or that of a delusional captain or that of an incestuous decadent or that of a by-product of the Revolution or that of a more confusing than confused pale-gray colored scrivener, among many others. And it will be even longer before I comment on it from here: from the marine and oceanic depths of these pages en route to the last and final shore. Me holding and losing my breath; because nothing is more exhausting than swimming upstream, taking in air, in pursuit of the always forgetful founts of memory.

[2] Imagine a book always at high sea. A book adrift and drifting in swirling digressions and dodging not icebergs of small tips and massive bottoms but compact glaciers that have as much to show as to hide. A book that is nothing but a perpetual draft, because every book is never-ending. A book that is the draft of a sketch; because the smallest constructions can be completed by their original architects; while the largest, the truest, always leave the conclusion on the tallest rooftops to fix and secure there the posterity of whoever reads them beyond the one who wrote it.

My case, without looking any further.

[3] His light casts my shadow. The one is the eclipse of the other. I, at his feet, will tell what he, lying there, tells me. He is bound and I’m bound to him; and I trust that all the information that I’ll offer has, moreover, some literary and dramatic value, beyond the tragedy and sorrow of the events that keep that man prostrate here. Thus, I shall send my indefinable imagination (truly the most exact of sciences) off to hunt and track and catch the facts. And then, flay and eviscerate them, as once upon a time I did whales. To those whales that, as the years pass, seem to me more and more the product of youth’s liquid dream. Always taking care to keep their stomach gasses from bursting and covering me with guts and blood and excrement. And to keep from spilling that illuminating sperm of the truth that, once processed, will be irreconcilable as something that happened but, at the same time, will be read (will be read by the light of candles and oil derived from that same whale sperm) as something even truer than it ever was. Reality only becomes really real after crossing the stormy sea of art and arriving safe and sound to the other shore. Not while we live it or write it, but later, when we read it; and only then does everything become logical and inevitable and we ask ourselves how we failed to see it or see it coming.

Thus, everything that one invents ends up (or starts out) being true and, taking place, ends up having taken place to thereby begin to take place.

by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden is available in better bookstores everywhere on October 8, 2024, and available at 30% off (until 11/1/2024) on the .��

To recap: we’ve seen how AI can thrust us into a world of infinite choice by theoretically translating (or eventually writing) any book out there, which is interesting from the point of view of connecting us with literature and cultures from around the world, but also exhausting, since we have more than enough to read/watch/listen to already; and then we saw how it can—with some prompting—help publishers market and explain their books. And in both instances, the material generated by AI (the Proust samples, the ��copy) is not dramatically better or worse than what the majority of humans can craft.

That said, I stated at the top (some 8,000 words ago) that my goal with these posts was to affirm the human and our ability to sense the uncanny valley of AI creations—and avoid them. Now, as we enter the final stretch, I’m going to try and convince you that not only can we sniff out AI, but that over the next five years, as a culture, we’re going to turn away from TikTok and short form narratives, reject the AI-pocalypse that is flooding our timelines, and instead seek out the full human experience, as presented by actual, living, breathing humans. Not sure I can convince myself of this hot take, but regardless, you’ll finally find out which Proust translation is which . . .

*

And we’re going to start with one of the best podcasts I’ve listened to all year: . A six-part series created and produced by , which is described as such:

Shell Game is a��podcast about things that are not what they seem, hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff. In Season One, that thing is Evan’s voice. By creating a voice clone and hooking it up to an AI chatbot, Evan set out to discover what happens when you try to take control of the very technology that threatens to replace you. Shell Game was named one of the the best podcasts of 2024 by New York Magazine and called “awesome” by The Verge. Over the course of six episodes, Evan’s voice agents talk to spammers and scammers, to Evan’s friends and family, to colleagues and sources, to other AIs, and even to a therapist—all to better understand what AI voice is able to do, what it can’t yet do, and what to expect from a future in which more and more of the people we encounter in the world aren’t real.

I’m not going to get into the details of how he does this (you can listen to the first episode and find out), but as mentioned in that (AI-created?) copy, he created a “voice agent”—an AI that uses recordings of your voice and backend scripts to do things for you such as call the doctor and set up an appointment, dispute a credit card charge, or, ideally, attend a Zoom meeting while you get wasted poolside.

This is, to put it bluntly, horrifying shit. We’ve had robocalls for ever and ever, but this is truly next level. For instance, in one episode he has his voice agent call a bunch of his friends. Some of them cotton on immediately, but one . . . doesn’t. And he’s totally unnerved by it for months afterward. (“Am I really talking to real Evan?” “Of course this is the real Evan.” “That’s what your AI said as well.”) It’s eerie to hear the recordings of AI Evan talking to a therapist at BetterHelp who takes Evan’s voice agent completely at face value. (Can you spot the difference by someone with mental health issues and an AI?) He even goes so far as to have his voice agent provide all the promotional interviews about the podcast to the tech media.

When I first discovered this podcast, I found it hilarious. Even though the concept is unnerving to say the least, the voice agent messes up a ton and you feel secure in human superiority. But by the end of the series, I was reading this a performance piece, à la Nathan Fielder. (Especially��.) Real-life Evan’s affect is pretty flat, but his AI’s is . . . odd. The pitch is a bit off. It’s a bit too excitable. It’s 99% of the way there, but you can sense the robot in the background. But putting that oddness into real life situations—the very situations that all big companies are striving for, where the only people on Zoom are AI voice agents who then summarize the content of the meeting for their real life counterparts—is funny, sure, but also illuminating as it points to something about being human that’s hard to define, but easy to recognize.

Like I said, most of his friends—along with the tech reporter interviewing AI Evan and also the founder of the voice agent service who AI Evan talks with (“I just wanted to create a system so I could have an AI call my mom.”)—recognize the ruse immediately. Then it’s up to them if they’re going to just go along with it or blow up AI Evan’s spot. And when they do, especially when they poke at AI Evan just a little bit, uncomfortably comedic things happen. Especially because the AI tends to lie and invent stuff. (See Part II, but exaggerate those little lies.) And because it gets confused—a lot. And repetitive. There’s so much, “Hey, it’s Evan. Great to hear from you. We should catch up soon” in this show.

But the three main points from Shell Game that relate to this winding series of posts are that 1) every technological advance removes something from the current state of being human (such as eliminating the richness of phone calls for two-dimensional texts; or as the phone did previously by reducing the need for face-to-face contact), 2) these things are proliferating like mad and anyone can make one and train it up in next to no time, and 3) the technology is stuck in the middle, where it’s most useful in theory, incapable of running a meeting. (My god, I only wish. I would give anything to send ChadGPT to all meetings ever.) And Evan’s fear is that we’ll remain stuck there, in the midddle, indefinitely. Anxious that AI will take over our lives and jobs, continually investing time and money into its “education,” but also encountering, over and again, these weird limitations that nevertheless mark it as inhuman. Like, for instance, the two AI translations of Proust that you most certainly have identified by now! Or, um . . .

*

This taps into a fear I’ve held for years, what I call in my head the “Interminable Middle,” or in a more dramatic, catchier fashion, the “Heat Death of Culture”: the sheer proliferation of content—be it books, short TikToks, images, music, tweets, AI voice agents that call me or talk to me in meetings—is so overwhelming that we only choose to interact with culture that we’re already familiar with, and as a result of that familiarity, everything seems . . . pretty good. Not horrible, not genius. But satisfies that “certain itch.” An itch of looking for something new that’s just like what you already like. Which, from a business point of view, we’ve always been moving in that direction, since it would eliminate risk and increase the probability of knowing that a particular cultural artifact—one that’s a close imitation of the trends and aesthetics behind a recent mega-success—would be a hit.

It’s expensive and financially risky to publish something that’s too��unusual. Not books that are “weird,” but books that are sui generis, use a style, structure, language, or method that will leave most readers questioning whether this is genius, or overrated, or just gobbledygook. The whole of literary history rides this line. Books that, in the moment, seem like insane gambles given the state of reading and book buying and what’s successful; but which, from the vantage point of the present, are brilliant bets on smart innovation.

From����to��. From����to��. There are dozens of these sorts of books out there that we could all name. What we can’t identify are the ones that fade away almost immediately. The counterexamples that, under different circumstances of time and brand and chance, could’ve been the truly “innovative” book that is talked about five years after publication.

Here are two extreme business models to choose from: 1) use AI to produce 10,000 literary works a year (including a ton of translations), by which you essentially create your own trends simply by creating a massive volume of work, teaching your AI to analyze then follow these trends in order to capitalize on them, or, 2) pay someone to analyze whatever amount of words they’re literally capable of reading, digesting that knowledge, then picking a book that could��become legendary, but is more likely to flop.

If you want money, pick number 1; choose 2 if you want to have fun. And likely lose your livelihood.

*

Although the best presses have a great editorial vision��and��enough variations and sheer volume of titles to sustain them, the second option can strike a lot of people as a form of gatekeeping. We’ll come back to this, but for the moment, I just want to acknowledge that the more people who make decisions about what does and doesn’t get get published, about what’s presented as “excellent” or “innovative” or “unique,” the better.

Regardless, from a reader’s point of view, this all sounds exhausting. Is there a need��for 10,000 new works of literature every year, just so a company can not just cover costs to stay afloat, but earn enough to produce 12,000 new books the next year? Not really. And if you want to know the state of our world, including all self-published works, ebook only publications, etc., it’s highly likely around 3 million new books are coming out every year—a majority of which are fiction. By contrast, twelve thou seems manageable.

When you reach this level of production, two things seem to happen: 1) according to the and , very very few works are astronomically popular, and almost everything else attracts next to no attention, and 2) it’s more rewarding to consume what you know is pretty good, than to spend the time looking for the uniquely genius.��

As such, the power law gets reinforced, a fewer range of works reach an ever larger amount of consumers and, because we’re chasing the “infinite middle” of culture of mass appeal amid infinite choices, everything becomes a 3.5. On GoodReads, almost all books published today are a standard deviation away from a 3.5 rating. Everything is pretty good to most people.

And if AI ran the business, churning product to be consumed by smaller and more specific audiences—but with a handful of creations every year being loved by seemingly everyone—most everything we encountered would probably be��pretty good. Passable. Human, AI, who cares? If it’s in front of me, is good enough, feels comfortable, and meets enough of my priors . . . I’d read at least 20-30 pages. And I’ll forget 95% of what I read or watch within five years. Or will conflate it with other things. It’ll all seem vaguely the same to me. Whether this is due to the difficulty of finding the unique amid an overwhelming amount of “decent” art or the onset of dementia—only time will tell!

But maybe it’s just because I read too much . . . Although if you don’t? . . . How will you ever know what’s good vs. satisfying, singular vs. competent? How do you make judgment when you can’t even experience a fraction of the possibilities?

That’s the Heat Death of the Universe I hand-wring over.

��*

And, looking toward the future, this situation is only going to get worse. You think there’s a lot of information available to you��now? Every technological innovation multiples the amount of available information. You have more pictures on your phone than were taken, globally, in, say, 1974. Information proliferates. Faster and faster all the time.

*

Let’s talk about Proust and his slow-lived, limited-information life. His going to bed habits as described to us across the years.

Six different translations of the opening pages of Proust are presented in Part I of this series. Four done by humans, two by AI. (Part II reveals that the was produced by Google Translate.)

For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, as soon as my candle had gone out, my eyes closed so quickly that I didn’t have time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to go to sleep woke me up; I wanted to put down the volume that I believed I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not stopped thinking while sleeping about what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a somewhat particular turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the work was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry of Francis I and Charles V.

To me, this it too long, too clunky. Also, although this gives away the game—note the use of “volume.” How often have you said, “I need to set down this volume.” It’s a book. It’s always a book you read in bed.

Of the six samples, number 2 is the only other one that uses the word “volume”:

For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, barely had I blown out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself, “I’m falling asleep.” And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to seek sleep would awaken me; I wanted to put down the volume which I believed was still in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased to make reflections in my sleep on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken on a somewhat particular turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the work spoke of: a church, a quartet, the rivalry of François I and Charles V.

And that, dear reader, was created by ChatGPT.

What’s really remarkable about this experiment was that my class, almost unanimously, chose number 2 as the best of the samples. And, , I can see why. It’s arguably the smoothest and, in some almost indefinable way, the least anxious. (But definitely the most 3.5.)

Your traction with the others may vary, but let’s look at James Grieve’s (sample 5):

Time was when I always went to bed early. Sometimes, as soon as I snuffed my candle, my eyes would close before I even had time to think, “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later, wakened by the idea that it must be time to go to sleep, I would feel the desire to put away my book, which I thought I was still holding, and blow out the light. While I had been sleeping, my mind had gone on thinking over what I had just been reading, although these thoughts had taken an odd turn—I had the impression that I myself had turned into the subject of the book, whether it was a church, a string quartet or the rivalry between François I and Charles V.

That opening line is so divisive! “Time was when I always went to bed early.” It barrels ahead, unlike the pause in “For a long time, I went to bed early.” Straight propulsion! And then “I snuffed my candle”??? That’s so bold! (See: “my candle scarcely out.” See: “when I had put out my candle.” “I snuffed.“) And I can bet, without knowing him at all, that there was significant thought put into this more than average deviation from the typical translation. And, he probably second-guessed himself at some point, uncertain if his choice works or if people will like it.

This is a human translation. Humans are messy. They fuck up and worry and doubt and fart and live. (And swear! That’s how you know I wrote this. Swearing is human.) It’s in the anxiety that we sense the human.

You feel anxiety in old Marcel, that’s for sure. (I love you, Marcel! I just need some space. To better appreciate you.)

Is��that��what we sense when we encounter AI? The smooth, over-confident, unquestioning nature of what it produces? But how many people stop to notice that?

*

Just so you have the full list, the translators are: Lydia Davis (1), ChatGPT (2), Original Moncrieff (3), Google Translate (4), James Grieve (5), and the Moncrieff revised by Kilmartin (6).

*

*

*

As AI improves and becomes increasingly capable of mimicking human creativity— translating our words, capturing our voices, and even calling my ex-wife so that I don’t have to—we risk losing the human touch that imbues our creations with authenticity.

And that’s precisely why the human experience will always matter. In a world flooded with AI-generated content, it’s the unique spark of the human that will stand out even more. Our imperfections, our quirks, our ability to perceive beauty in unexpected places—these are the qualities that define us and make our creations resonate. AI can churn out endless content—so much endless content—but it can’t replicate the singular.

Being human means more than just processing information; it’s about being messy. As we move forward, I believe we’ll see a resurgence of interest in the messy, in the uniquely human aspects of art and culture. People will seek out those authentic voices, the ones that speak to our shared humanity in ways no algorithm can. The more automated and digitized the world becomes, the more we’ll crave the real, the raw, the deeply personal.

We have an incredible opportunity to use AI not just to replace us but to amplify what makes us special. It can help us reach new audiences, break down barriers, and explore creative possibilities we never imagined. But it will always be our bullshit that breathes life into those possibilities.

So let’s embrace this new era with optimism. Let’s use these tools to tell our stories, to connect across cultures and languages, to share what it means to be alive in ways that only humans can. The future isn’t about AI taking over; it’s about making work-life shorter and our free-time longer—so that we can play.

*

Today, I want to look at the possibility of AI assisting publishers—and translators, and authors, and readers—in ways other than simply creating more products to sell. AI as a productive tool for marketing and, with a little luck, book discovery. In other words: Can AI help solve some of our decision fatigue both by finding you the book you should be reading and/or by helping marketing directors and publicists present books in the best possible way?

This is��frequently��on my mind—especially when it comes to writing book descriptions (aka, jacket copy), or to be honest, creating any of the materials our distributor (Consortium/Ingram) need in order to sell our books. They always have us enter in this information over what would be winter break for me (late-December through early-January), or right at the end of the school year (May). The info they need then, for pre-sales meetings,�� is referred to as a book’s metadata, and, one the base level, is super easy and quick to produce. Things like ISBN, Title, Author, Translator, Price, Rights Territories, etc. Objective, simple, factual bits of information.

But after that, things get more squishy . . . For instance, there are , which are used to categorize books, such as “FICTION / Literary” or “FICTION / Romance / Paranormal / Shifters” or “FICTION / World Literature / Scotland / 20th Century.” There are thousands of these spread across fifty-three categories. And some books (think Dubravka Ugresic’s nonfiction, think Dmitry Bykov’s hybrid work —which is about Zelenskiy, but is neither biography not cultural criticism) can fall into a number of these categories. Although figuring out exactly which categories they fall into can be confusing. (There are thousands. And although Consortium is helpful in this, no one involved in the labeling process knows both the book itself and the full list of options.) Regardless, this is an act of marketing that we have to perform as publishers. We choose what other books this book gets grouped with, and, I can only assume, some labels, some categories, would help sell more copies of a book than others through the specificity and that label’s audience.

From there, things get more subjective and require marketing insight and consideration to be optimally effective:�� bios, translator bios, keywords, and my least favorite: jacket copy. Writing jacket copy is one of my least favorite things to do, since what appeals to me about a book might not be what draws in anyone else. (I remember John O’Brien criticizing my copy because I originally used the term “postmodern.” Worth noting that he had no issue with this line from the copy for��—first jacket copy of mine to go out into the world—which reads, in part, “22-year-old philosophy student whose buttocks are so beautiful their description has been banned from the printed page.” Clearly, people prefer a nice butt to postmodern shenanigans.)

One of the issues with jacket copy—especially for translations—is that, frequently, this information has to be entered into Ingram’s system (CoreSource) before I’ve had time to edit the books, or even read them in full. This is partly my own fault for announcing books too far in advance (sometimes before the translations have even arrived), but honestly, I work just about a year in advance for the bulk of my editorial projects. And, to make this concrete, I’ll have to submit descriptions for books coming out in March 2026 before the end of this��year.

This copy isn’t fixed in stone, but it does go out to Amazon, Bookshop.org, Edelweiss+ (site for booksellers and reviewers), our website, etc., etc., so it’s pretty damn important. It’s also the basis the sales reps use to describe our books to buyers at bookstores, and is likely what book review editors will also see.

As with the Proust AI translation exercise detailed in Part I—I haven’t forgotten, you’ll get the answer key soon!—it’s debatable how much value is added by having slightly better copy. But there is great value in freeing up your time and mental energy for other projects. And my god how I stress out over writing copy! If only I knew what words and phrases people gravitated toward (butts?), or what’s worked in the past, or if there’s a secret formula . . .

Enter AI! Every day, I’m barraged by dozens of ads for how AI can make my work life easier and more efficient. “Remember when we wrote emails without AI?” is a scoff I hear on the regular. (To those few who receive them, could you imagine AI writing my��emails? I joked about this a couple years back in this post, but seriously, if you think these posts are long and rambling and digressive and sort of dirty, you should be one of my pen pals!) But given just how much corporations are leaning into the whole “integrate AI into your workflow” thing—and I admit, there are many benefits, and many emails I’ve received should have been written by AI so the sender would’ve avoided sounding like a simpleton, or simply to fix the tone—maybe it is possible that AI could solve jacket copy . . . Not to mention the other two metadata categories that cause me fits: Key Selling Points (reasons why anyone would want this book, independent of its content) and Publicity Plans (which all sort of fall into a pattern of sameness, given how little time and few resources we have to get truly creative and go big). Save me, ChatGPT! Make my metadata better!

*

Before going to ChatGPT to explore the possibilities, I fooled around with some knock-off AI options, such as , the name of which delights me. I found it in a Reddit thread where someone wanted an AI service so they could ask questions about specific books. (To make essay writing for class easier, I assume.) This is the headline at the top of its very sparse webpage:

Search for a book that you want to ask questions to – Powered by ChatGPT

You only need the book title, and Artificial Intelligence takes care of the rest

Promising! Or at least potentially fun.

Now, I had my doubts as to whether this service would actually have any Open Letter books listed, but lo and behold, ��pops right up!

As you can see, what I asked AI Book Nerd (which really should have its own Instagram account to share the weirdest query results) was to summarize NETD.��And here’s the nonsense it spat out:

WTF. Like, literally, What. In. The. Fuck.

What blows my mind about this is that our jacket copy is readily available! It’s eminently findable! That’s truly what I was expecting to get as a response. “The conquest of Mexico is over, and Juan de Toñanes is one of so many soldiers without glory who roam like beggars for the land they helped subdue. When he receives one last mission, to hunt down a renegade Indian who’s called the Father . . .” I mean, it’s right there. What is this “mysterious literary society in Madrid”? And “Grigor Fedorov”??�� GTFO.

Now, it’s super easy to goof on AI mistakes—and easy to feed it misinformation so that it believes “belief” has 3 S’s in it—and sure, it’ll get better, but at first glance, what it seems best at is lying and gaslighting users. For instance, in prepping our recent newsletter about the release of Dubravka Ugresic’s , I wanted to revisit the .��So I googled “Kirkus Reviews Dubravka Ugresic” and received this tiny, and totally inaccurate, summary from Gemini AI, Google’s in house AI service.

That “overview” is immediately above the top search result which, duh and or obviously, happens to be the . So, in short, Google has an AI summary bot that can’t incorporate data from��its own search engine????

Again, the value in pointing out these flaws is mostly humorous. (Or maybe a work of performative art. Tune in to Part III for more on that.) Although, before shifting gears, I do have one more funny to make. I asked ChatGPT over the summer to write “an ode to J.D. Vance in the style of Rupi Kaur” and I got this gem:

your cushions hold
the weight of my dreams
the spills
of my late-night thoughts

Amazing! And wow! Can’t figure out that Kirkus��reviewed , but is right on point with J.D. and his couch proclivities. This is the future.

*

But what if we swerve from the idea of AI being able to digest a text, distill it, and know how to market it to actual humans for a second, and instead look to AI for helping us wade through the endless amount of product out there? We’ve fretted about “the algorithm” for years, noting how Instagram ads “just happen” to match up with the topics we were just��talking about. We know that Amazon, for decades now, has used their special algorithm to recommend products and has been working on “” to send you products you didn’t know you needed until they arrive.

AI adds some wrinkles to this concept. Although it’s built via algorithms, AI veers from calculation into the realm of “intelligence,” making decisions based on factors that aren’t 100% mathematic. Totally linked ideas, yet separate.

There have been a lot of algorithmic-based book recommendation engines over the years outside of Amazon. BookLamp (defunct after being sold to Apple to be the algorithm powering the wildly popular [sic] Apple Books app), , , . All of these apply different strategies for how they evaluate and compare books—for instance, Small Demons is all about proper nouns, BookLamp used “Book DNA” à la Pandora to parse books across hundreds of “genetic” elements—but all of these rely on their inputs and the human thinking behind how to categorize and group books.

For example: When BookLamp was available, I once asked it to recommend books I would like if I liked����and, based on the “BookDNA” which included high marks in “Vehicular Fiction” and “Southern Family Saga” recommend to me a YA title about a teenager growing up in Mississippi. Swing and a miss!

Or, in the case of WhichBook—where you choose four categories and how extreme you want the recommendations to be in each—I asked for something “funny,” “disturbing,” “unusual,” and with “extreme sexual content” and was lead directly to . Regardless, although the connection between the service’s structure and the user’s input are connected by advanced algorithms, these tend to have�� wildly inaccurate recommendations.

But if making fun of bad AI results is silly and not advancing any ideas, dunking on the algorithm is just as pointless. In terms of books—or any cultural product—the algorithm ignores style. The connections made between artworks have to be more easily mappable. Figuring out how to quantify Faulkner’s style is too advanced for the machine circa 2013.

By contrast, an AI recommendation bot could, in theory, make decisions for you that aren’t so beholden to this sort of quantified analysis. In the abstract, these recommendations would be more akin to our own decision-making process—current mood, environmental trends, overall vibes, inexplicable longings—and would be more focused on what you should read now for the greatest benefit, whatever that may be. (Acquiring knowledge, entertainment, linguistic puzzling, fodder for the cocktail party at the country club.) I could input the 30 books on my current “to read” pile and it would decide for me what to read, and in what order. Although maybe it would lie? Tell me “there is no new book by Kate Atkinson”?

*

So, the question is: can it do that? I mean, I asked ChatGPT to convince me why the St. Louis Cardinals would win the World Series this year and it referenced a half-dozen players who haven’t played for the team in years. Devoted as I am to actual experiential results and not just half-assed theorizing, I literally just had this conversation with ChatGPT:

CWP: tell me what book i should read next

ChatGPT: I can recommend a book based on what you’re interested in! Do you prefer fiction or non-fiction? Any particular genres or themes you enjoy, like sci-fi, fantasy, history, or personal development? Let me know what you’re in the mood for.

CWP: literary fiction in translation that is linguistically and structurally complicated

[ChatGPT recommends by Haruki Murakami,����and����by Roberto Bolaño,����by Andrei Bely, and����by Julio Cortázar. Three of these are three of my favorite books of all time.]

CWP: I’ve read all of those. Give me a similar recommendation from a book released in 2024

ChatGPT: For a literary fiction recommendation in translation from 2024, you might enjoy by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead. Set in a dystopian future, this experimental novel blends fiction, philosophy, and reflections on artificial intelligence, while examining the nature of human relationships. Its complex narrative and style, reminiscent of Borges and Bolaño, explore the meaning of love and humanity in an era dominated by technology. It’s expected to be a rich, structurally intricate read, ideal for those who appreciate both intellectual depth and narrative experimentation​. Another upcoming release is by Marina Yuszczuk, translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary. This feminist, gothic novel interweaves two time periods and explores themes of loneliness, desire, and motherhood through the stories of a vampire in 19th-century South America and a modern-day woman in Buenos Aires​.

Both of these works promise the kind of linguistic and structural complexity you’re looking for!

[OK. Wow. I may think Mallo is overrated, but I’ve read everything available in English. And a book about AI talking about the human vs. inhuman? Sounds . . . familiar. And anything Heather Cleary translates is gold.]

CWP: based on what I’ve told you, out of these three books, which should I read next: by Rachel Kushner, by Kate Atkinson, or by Jose Donoso?

ChatGPT: Based on your preference for linguistically and structurally complicated fiction, I would recommend reading ““ by José Donoso next. This novel is an intricate masterpiece of Latin American literature, known for its surreal, fragmented narrative and dense prose. It delves deep into themes of madness, identity, and reality, with a nonlinear structure that constantly shifts between perspectives and timelines. The complexity of the novel aligns well with your interest in challenging, layered texts.

While Rachel Kushner’s and Kate Atkinson’s are both engaging in their own ways, neither matches the level of linguistic experimentation and structural innovation found in Donoso’s work. offers a unique, immersive challenge that seems perfectly suited to your tastes!

Title:��

Author: Fernanda Trías

Translator: Heather Cleary

Publisher:

Publication Year (Original Text): 2020

Page Count: 220

Goodreads Rating: 3.66 with 3,532 ratings and 740 reviews

Notable Amazon Sales Ranking: #858 in��Horror Short Stories (??—not short stories, or horror? OK . . .)

Publisher Description: In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world,��Pink Slime��is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge, and the beauty and fragility of our most intimate relationships.

Previous Familiarity:��I was convinced—until five minutes ago—that I had met Trías at the Chautauqua Institution last summer as part of an event on climate change with Andri Snær Magnason. I did not. I met , whose book,����was translated from the Spanish and published by Charco. I mean, that’s sort of close-ish?

Translator: Heather Cleary! I met Heather when she was just getting started at an event we did for Macedonio Fernández’s��.��She’s done three Sergio Chejfec (R.I.P.) titles for us:��,��, and��.��(My god these three books are so good. Chejfec was special and deserves a rediscovery of sorts.) She’s incredibly gifted and always chooses interesting projects.

My Reading: Very anxious book that reads like a warning about future climate catastrophes and how these events will wreak havoc on social structures. I joked above about how this book isn’t��really��horror (at least not to me), but the “red fog” that rolls in and sets this whole climate disaster in motion flays the skin off people who encounter it, which is both gross and, yes, horrifying. Most interesting to me though is the “pink slime” of the title—a strange, affordable foodstuff that everyone survives on—is so so similar to the food served in the Institute in��Lanark. (In Lanark, the gross foodstuff is made from humans. Horrifying!)

Reflections on Style:��Pretty direct and evocative. “When the fog rolled in, the port turned into a swamp. Shadows fell across the plaza, filtering between the trees and leaving the long marks of their fingers on all they touched. Under each unbroken surface, mold cleaved silent through wood, rust bored into metal. Everything was rotting.” There are little zen-like, unattributed conversations (presumably between our narrator and her ex, Max) that add a bit of levity:

Once upon a time.

There was what?

Once upon a time there was a time.

That never was?

That never again.

The book is pretty bleak—a situation only reinforced by the audiobook narrator, Frankie Corzo—whose voice and cadence is��so��serious. Pink Slime is really interesting, but after this and��Woodworm, I’m dying for a book that I’d find more enjoyable and maybe a little silly—translations don’t have to be so medicinal!

Any Big Reviews?: In the��New York Times, where Lydia Millet (one of my favorite authors) says:

On either side of the caregiving woman stands a damaged and damaging male, one with power and one without. Yet inertia, too, is at the root of her paralysis — she cannot leave, she confesses, because she’s unable to imagine a life untethered to her anchors. Only the absence of these tragic boy-men may allow her to have some agency at last.

Will It Be Discussed in Five Years: I’m really curious as to how these sorts of books will fare if we have more and more environmental disasters. Will these be of interest as things fall apart, or are they best enjoyed as warnings of what��could��come to pass?

What Authors/Books Does the Publisher Compare This To: None, actually. But three of the blurbs are from authors you could group together with Trías: Mariana Enríquez, Guadalupe Nettel, and Jazmina Barrera.

Any Books You Would Recommend for Fans of��Pink Slime: by Agustina Bazterrica &��Sarah Moses, and����by Alasdair Gray.

Will it Win: My sense of things—from Winter in Sokcho��through��The Words that Remain—is that short, localized, slightly strange fiction does really well for the National Book Award. And this book has those qualities! Still haven’t read enough of these to make an informed prediction, but I’ll put this at 15% for the time being.

Your Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

I thought it would be fun to try and unpack some of these ideas against Proust’s very slow, very over-stuffed masterpiece, since most of these are very contemporary concerns that revolve around the explosion of information and ways of accessing it, whereas Marcel spends so much time idling, chasing chicks, attending parties, explaining the intricacies of ballroom and salon life by namedropping hundreds of ducs, duchesses, marquises, and the like, with the Dreyfus Affair being one of the few topical topics presented in the book of which most (some? a few?) of today’s readers will have previous knowledge.

[There’s a reason that, for volume four alone, there are 402 footnotes spread across 30 pages. That’s one of the seven volumes. One.]

I wrote an intro post alluding to this scheme, then one when I finished Swann’s Way, then . . . disappeared for most of 2024.

That was bound to happen—I’m not good at carrying through on my schemes—but there’s also a larger reason, which is where I want to start this, the second official entry in my scheme (with parts three and four coming later this week). Namely, I want to be a polyamorous reader.

I mean, it always��sounds��good at the start of year to commit to some big, overarching goal. (Hence, New Year’s resolutions.) It’s exciting to think that every day I’d have 10, um, pages of Proust penetrating my mind until I had consumed him whole. But after 60, 70, 200 days of mostly the same things—party, girls, jealousy, striations of high society, it all gets a little . . . vanilla. I need some variety. I’m not a one-author sort of man!

Given that 99% of my reading time is dedicated to editing books for Open Letter (, , , ) or Dalkey Archive (, ) and cranking out OCR conversions so that as many Dalkey titles as possible are available to interested readers (for a bit more detail about this, backlists, POD, etc., see forthcoming post), I have very little time for “fun” reading. And there are new books by , , , , , , , , .[1] That doesn’t even include other books, like Megan McDowell’s retranslation of����(dying to get to),��the books I’ve been carrying around for years, or the books that I’m addicted to thanks to the all-too brilliant Apple+ TV App Streaming TV show. And there are thousands more backlist titles I’d like to discover or reread—including the hundreds of Dalkey titles that I want to either a) make available available again for readers like you, or b) that I need to reread for my longer book project. (I’m not��giving up on this project. Trust me?)

In short: Proust is great, but I need to have some other connections. I’m sorry, Marcel, but we’re gonna need to open this shit up. It’s not you . . . well, it’s sort of you . . . but really, it’s just that there are so so many attractive options out there, all available to me, all offering up varying levels of joy and satisfaction. And what would life be like if you didn’t explore your larger interests? I’m not leaving you, Marcel, I’m not. I just don’t need your 10 pages a day . . . We can extend this relationship . . . cool things off a bit . . . deescalate, as the kids say . . . I mean, I��only��have 1,301 pages left. We’ll get there. It’ll be OK.

*

Before we get to the personal, let’s start at the practical. At the highest level of publishing��as��business. Publishing as activity to produce product that produces money. A level that makes me uncomfortable—where not everybody on staff could possibly read all their own books—but one that AI, our hand-wringing meta-topic for the next three posts could play a significant role. So that’s where we’ll start: how AI (ChatGPT being the tool most people are familiar with, and is what I used while writing this) could impact larger publishing issues of strategy and production.

Totally oversimplifying here, but: All budgets consist of fixed costs (salaries, operational expenses like rent and supplies, things that are constant regardless of how many books are produced), and variable costs (advances, individual book marketing expenses, printing costs, etc., things that are contingent on the details of the individual products and how many of them are produced), which are offset by revenues generated by sales (frontlist and backlist, subrights, merchandise [haha]) and, in the case of nonprofits, donations. (If you’re a press like Biblioasis or Deep Vellum with a indie bookstore associated with the press, that could also be a revenue stream. And you should all get to Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis’s store is a dream.) Which, from a capitalist viewpoint, flows into the idea that the more profitable products you can produce while keeping fixed costs low will lead to long-term financial success. Profits. Bonuses. Private jets.

For example, let’s lowball it all and say a press has five employees and fixed costs of $400,000/year ($320,000 in salaries and benefits, $50,000 in rent and utilities, $30,000 in other business expenses). And let’s just use $20,000 as a starting point for the cost of doing an individual book—in a traditional fashion with advances and fees paid to the author and translator (when applicable)—costs $20,000 to produce ($10,000 in artist expenses, $8,000 in printing, $2,000 in marketing).

If you do one single book a year, your overall expenses are $420,000 and you would have to sell approximately 60,000 units of a book with a list price of $20 to simply break even—which would necessitate and additional $140,000 in printing bills (on top of the initial $8,000), and at the end of which, you would owe around $90,000 in royalties . . .

[Just to clarify, of that $20 list price, $10 goes as a discount to retailers, and ~30% of net receipts to your distributor, so you’d earn about $7/unit. And that doesn’t include extraneous fees, which tend to be legion if you’re with any of the main distributors—aka Ingram Publishing Services—available to indie presses. If you’re able to do your own��distribution, this whole model would change, adding on astronomically high warehouse and technology costs, many new employees, etc., but you wouldn’t have to pay yourself for doing the distribution, so your net income per book should be higher.]

From here, things get scaled: Publish 10 books and your overall budget needs to be $620,000 and you need to sell 88,571 total units or 8,857 per title just to break even. Move it to 50 titles a year and, well, your employees will hate you (remember, we set the number of staff at five for this exercise) and you’ll face issues of differentiation and sales velocity (topics for later), but the overall budget is $1,420,000, requiring 202,857 total net sales, or 4,057 per title. Again, this is only to offset expenses—not even turn a profit! We’re starting to get into a space where you can squint and see a pathway to the black . . . (Although, again, the printing cost of $8,000 does not accommodate this volume of sales. I’m working on an Excel model of all this mostly to see if I can. And because I’m a dork.)

I’m leaving out several things, intentionally. Sales of foreign rights and audiobooks would contribute to the bottom line, sure, but not in a way significant enough to really alter this model. Donations would, but, again, that’s a different post. Backlist sales would though, significantly. As John O’Brien would say, “If we had 500 backlist titles selling an average of 75 copies a year, that would be 37,500 units and a couple hundred thousand in sales and would act like a functioning endowment of sorts.” This is especially fruitful if you already have the stock sitting in a warehouse, or if you just put all your titles up in LightningSource (a print-on-demand service at Ingram) and save on all upfront printing costs for books that will likely sell a consistent 40-100 copies a year.

Plugging this backlist treasure-trove into my model above, if you did 50 books a year, had that five employee set-up, cranked out product, and had a giant backlist (say 1,000 titles) to rely on, you would only need to sell 2,557 units on average of each frontlist title (the new books coming out in a given year, versus backlist, which is everything from the past) over the course of a year.

If you’re interested, I’m planning on writing more about this same thing with relation to Dalkey’s backlist in the next which is, ostensibly, about ‘s Cuanduine Trilogy.

And this sort of scheming plays a large role in the Mining the Dalkey Archive��book I’m slowly working on (forthcoming sometime, maybe, fingers crossed). Publishing runs like a Ponzi scheme, printing Peter to pay Mary to steal from Paul, and John added his own twists to this.

But here and now, we’re about to take two very bleak turns, play a game, and set up the next two pieces of this series (which are shorter! Most of the heavy lifting is here).

*

I promise you that by the end, I’ll reassert the integral importance of editorial vision as it relates to readership, being a global literary citizen, and value, but for today, we’re going Pure Amoral Capitalist.

As anyone in the industry knows, predicting overall book sales is a bit of a fool’s errand. There’s not enough market research to provide useful comps, things breakout for random reasons (remember the year of adult coloring books?), the best titles fail because of a pandemic. But if you do this for long enough—like twenty-five years—you can get pretty good at assessing the floor and ceiling for a given book. “That’ll probably sell 700, but could do 2,000 if things broke the right way, or 300 if they don’t” is a typical statement with insanely broad error bars. Give me enough historical data and time, and I can probably get this within 300 or so units for 90% of books, but the point is: Assuming you can sell, on average, 3,500 copies of a book in one year is a wild swing, and hard to pull off for most presses smaller than New Directions, Graywolf, or New York Review Books.

This��used��to be possible, but, tipping my pitches here, there are just too many books nowadays. With so many options, so much noise, the average sales per title have been depressed over the past couple decades. A certain percentage of titles take off and sell far more than 3,000, but the rest don’t even sniff that number.

As such, and employing Dark Capitalist Mojo, the most likely route to broad financial success is throwing more and more��books into the marketplace while keeping a chokehold on fixed expenses. Something is sure to stick! Turn publishing away from an editorial enterprise into a numbers game. And what if you can do that by keeping down��both��fixed costs and variable ones? Like, what if you didn’t have to pay a printing bill unless it was tied to actual sales (the print to order strategy mentioned above, but for everything)?�� And/or cut down on artist expenses?

Print-to-order is a reality to be addressed elsewhere, but limiting payments to artists is where AI comes in.

*

For years now, in my World Literature and Translation class, the first assignment is an evaluation of multiple translations of the same piece of literature. I’ve used multiple versions of ��for years—always fun and, in lieu of , it’s interesting that the Pevear and Volokhonsky never fared well, and to be honest, that was also my least favorite of the translations—but this year I got bored and decided to switch things up. And trick my students in the process.

What I did was provide them with six unmarked samples (you can download all six versions if you want to play along at home , , , , , ) of the opening pages of Proust’s . (Now that I’m blowing this game, next time I teach this, I should probably use part of . Following with my prescribed rubric, the spirit of volume two—especially the Balbec section about all the young girls blossoming around Marcel and the peripatetic nature of his attraction to each—hovers over the rest of this post.) I told them��nothing��about where these came from—just that they had to pick the one they would publish and write a paper articulating why that version, both in terms of what sets it apart from the others and how those others fall short.

Here’s the opening from each of the six versions:

For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. (Version 1)

For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, barely had I blown out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself, “I’m falling asleep.” And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to seek sleep would awaken me; I wanted to put down the volume which I believed was still in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased to make reflections in my sleep on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken on a somewhat particular turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the work spoke of: a church, a quartet, the rivalry of François I and Charles V. (Version 2)

For a long time I went to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. (Version 3)

For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, as soon as my candle had gone out, my eyes closed so quickly that I didn’t have time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to go to sleep woke me up; I wanted to put down the volume that I believed I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not stopped thinking while sleeping about what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a somewhat particular turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the work was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry of Francis I and Charles V. (Version 4)

Time was when I always went to bed early. Sometimes, as soon as I snuffed my candle, my eyes would close before I even had time to think, “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later, wakened by the idea that it must be time to go to sleep, I would feel the desire to put away my book, which I thought I was still holding, and blow out the light. While I had been sleeping, my mind had gone on thinking over what I had just been reading, although these thoughts had taken an odd turn—I had the impression that I myself had turned into the subject of the book, whether it was a church, a string quartet or the rivalry between François I and Charles V. (Version 5)

For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar tum; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Fran9ois I and Charles V. (Version 6)

I’ll give you the results of my mini-survey later, but before anything else is revealed, you should take a minute and pick out a) which one(s) you would read/publish, and b) which one(s) you absolutely would not. Hint: Four are by human translators, two aren’t.

*

This class took place at the height of AI Anxiety within our industry. . . . Nobody wanted to lose their job to a fucking AI—especially AI “trained” on the backs of human labor.

You can probably see where this is going . . . Operating under the core-capitalist principle of making as much money as possible, consequences be damned, a publisher could be pulled to employ AI to create its works. At first blush, I suspect we’d all hesitate at the idea that AI could invent a full book . . . ? Have you read ? (No. Not the one you’re thinking of.) There’s so much shit out there in the world that is competently written, but not particularly good. Using various prompts and scripts, reference points, and craft books, I’m willing to bet that we’re not far away from version X.X of ChatGPT being produce something that’s passable. () And the same goes for translation. (We wouldn’t be so anxious if we didn’t think it was at least possible.) The real question is: What makes a piece of writing “passable”? And if it’s “passable,” is that good enough? Would you��really know if that totally mid book you stumbled up and decided to read for whatever reason was written by a “real,” living writer.

My argument—which is more of a hot take, a wish-fulfillment fantasy—is that there is something inherently human in human-created art, something we can’t identify but that we’re attracted to. As if our subconscious can feel the uncanny valley and then subtly rejects it. What does it mean to be inhuman though? And what does that look like when there are just words on a page? But you have to wait for Part III to get the full picture of my bold—and way too optimistic—statement about the future of culture.

For now though . . . AI shit passes when it comes to translation. It’s not perfect, it may not even be great, but in a void with no referents, it probably won’t stand out. Poor writing is. Poorly written books are published. AI is “good enough.”

By now, I’m sure you’ve picked out one of the AI versions above—but did you identify both?

*

Remember the 3% Problem? I’ve been distancing myself from it for a bit to focus less on production and more on the books that are published, but for anyone unaware,�� this “problem”—and the name of this blog—comes from the fact that 3% of the total number of books published in the U.S. are in translation. I can give you a mathematical argument that in 2024 that percentage is actually much lower; I can show you that the average number of translations actually published has been on the rise, with peaks and valleys, over the past couple decades.

The point is: There are so many great books in the world, so many essential voices, and no possible way to publish even a fraction of them given the publishing constraints detailed above. The sales aren’t there to make the money work. Full stop.Beyond that, how many books could all the professional English-language translators in the world produce in a given year? Ignore the low wages and fact these translators would need to sustain themselves, somehow, I’m just thinking of the time.��It’s a fascinating thought experiment to try and establish the upper limit of translation possibility. Is it . . . 10,000 books? 25,000? 100,000? Whatever the ceiling might be, it’s for sure only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the total works published in a given year—and a microscopic percentage of all that already exists out there.

But, you know, if AI was “good enough” . . . and you invested heavily in production . . . there’s no reason you couldn’t churn out 1,000 translations a year, paying no one except for the original rights holder, a typesetter (soon to be replaced by AI that can take InDesign templates and go) and a proofreader (hahahaha who the fuck cares) and someone to upload the files into LightningSource. These books likely wouldn’t sell very many copies, but if they each sold a minimum of 200? And, say, 100 of them sell 1,000 units, 1o sell 5,000, and 1 sells 25,000? It’s a numbers game, baby, and the more titles you make available, the more likely you are to hit the lotto with one of them.

*

Thinking about publishing 1,000 books a year gives me hives. Hell, more that 24 is a bit of a nightmare for a small press or anyone hoping to read and think about each of the books they publish. I can’t even decide which book to read next for fun, in my spare time. I finished Spook Street by Mick Herron last night as my “book for fun” (currently editing António Lobo Antunes’s��, proofing Stanley Elkin’s , doing a final pass on Javier Serena’s��, correcting the OCR of Eshkol Nevo’s , and reading Layla Martinez’s����for a different post—all “work” books) and have no fewer than thirty titles in front of me (plus a dozen or more on my Kindle) that I really want to read. But how does one make a choice? You’ll never read everything, so just pick something . . .

But what if I want to watch something instead? I can’t even guesstimate how many movies I’ve missed out on in the past decade, and I have subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, Max, Disney+, Apple+ TV, Paramount+ (enough with the plusses already!), and probably something I forgot about, like Tubi or Criterion.

Although honestly, I just want to find time to listen to music. I have 1,929 songs in my “2024 Music” playlist to explore. And that’s��only��releases from this year. (And doesn’t include a single Chappell Roan song or Taylor Swift remix.)

All of that is real, and even if it’s presented in a cheesy way (or corny? what food metaphor is most dismissive these days?), the point is valid: there’s no shortage of content. If I were 30 years younger (or 40??), you could add to my content consumption habits hours of YouTube videos, short-form video content on Instagram and TikTok, and other social media platforms that traffic in information sharing as entertainment and time-wasting—it’s overwhelming. There is simply too much information.

Making a choice in the face of infinite choices requires heuristics to help trim things down to a reasonable number. Although I don’t think you��can��get to a reasonable number while engaging with the “new.” You can stay in the 1990s music wise and forget all things that came out since. Revisit the list of movies you imprinted on. Or, what I tend to do with books (remember that list of authors above?), is read all the new titles by authors I already know I like. That’s a good bet, and gives my reading life a sort of continuity. Even if it’s not their best work, it’s likely to be comfortable, familiar. (Although, to be honest, I choose the books I read by setting up strange schemes for myself related to ideas I want to write about, such as the NBA and NTA longlists for Translated Literature. Or fucking Proust.)

Translated literature functions as a sort of sub-genre that helps in terms of selection. You could, if you so chose, read a significant percentage of translations published in a given year. But that’s because the new number of translated works of fiction and poetry coming out in a given year is around 600. Now, imagine if there were an additional 10,000 literary translations available every year. How would you parse that? What are you missing out on? How do you find a community when, if everyone you know followed their own impulse, it’s possible that none of you ever read the same book?

Decision-making is a notoriously energy consuming activity. It’s why certain successful businessmen own endless variations of the same suit—they don’t have to waste time deciding what to wear. But seriously, it’s exhausting trying to wade through all the entertainment possibilities available to us. And the available information multiplies all the time. As a result, no matter how much media one consumes, it’s a smaller and smaller percentage of the whole. Which, for some, can be anxiety making. It’s daunting! And, for the average person, leads back to consuming the things you already know, or the things that are incredibly popular (see: nostalgia).

And that’s where we’ll leave things for today. Up next: AI and marketing.

[1] These names will come up again later in an important context.

Anyway, I thought to myself that it would be a good idea to try and read all of these before the award ceremony (I’ll be cutting it tight, and I don’t think the Solvej Balle book comes out before the ceremony) and write something kind of frivolous about each title. Like, in the vein of the old “Why This Book Should Win” posts for the Best Translated Book Award (R.I.P.). So here goes . . .

Title:��

Author: Layla Martínez

Translators: Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott

Publisher:

Publication Year (Original Text): 2021

Page Count: 153

Goodreads Rating: 4.16 with 11,800 ratings and 2,283 reviews

Notable Amazon Sales Ranking: #286 in Ghost Fiction

Publisher Description: The house breathes. The house contains bodies and secrets. The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes.��It was built by a smalltime hustler as a��means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave. They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.

In this lush translation by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott,��Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. Described by Mariana Enriquez as “a��house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge,” this vision of a broken family in our unjust world places power in the hands of the eccentric, the radical, and the desperate.

Previous Familiarity:��So, I wanted to do this book for Open Letter and read a sample back in the summer of 2022. And then blew our chance by not getting in an offer in time for the auction. Which we likely would’ve lost. And that’s fine—Two Lines is excellent! But I did know the outline and general themes of the book before starting it this week.

Translators: Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott are both absolutely fantastic. I edited their translation of��Montevideo��by Enrique Vila-Matas (pub date ???) this past spring, and it was such a gifted, assured, excellent translation. Allowed for very strategic editing suggestions, whereas some translations feel like they need one more pass by the translator.

My Reading:��It’s a book about intergenerational trauma and, to some extent, the impact of Spain’s Civil War. I mean, there are��literally��skeletons in the closet in this. It also addresses the divisions between social classes, with the two narrators— granddaughter and grandmother—and isolated and not well off, yet are entangled for generations with the very wealthy Jarabos.

Reflections on Style:��The language in the book is a bit off-kilter, which is fitting with the gothic horror elements present throughout. (The scratching, the spirits inhabiting the house, the grandmother’s conversations with the “saints,” etc.) That said, it’s not wildly experimental or anything, just clipped with interesting word choices, such as in the opening line: “I walked in and the house pounced on me.” The chapters go back-and-forth from granddaughter to grandmother There were times where I’d put the book down, and when I picked it back up have to reorient myself as to who was talking since the voices are rather similar, but that’s a minor complaint.

Any Big Reviews?: In the��New Yorker, who said, “Shadowed by the Spanish Civil War and the remarkable cruelty of men, the violent tale unspools into a potent consideration of inherited trauma and the elusiveness of justice.”

Will It Be Discussed in Five Years:��I would say that’s not assured. If it wins, sure! But otherwise . . . maybe? And this isn’t a slight on the book! It’s just that most books fade from public consciousness after a couple three years—until they’re “rediscovered” a decade later. This does fit a certain type of book that’s quite popular now, so it should have great word-of-mouth.

What Authors/Books Does the Publisher Compare This To: Samanta Schweblin and Fernanda Melchor. And throw in Mariana Enriquez, who blurbed it.

Any Books You Would Recommend for Fans of��Wormwood:����by Lucío Cardoso and����by José Donoso.

Will it Win: My sense of things—from Winter in Sokcho through��The Words that Remain—is that short, localized, slightly strange fiction does really well for the National Book Award. And this book has those qualities! It’s the first I’ve read so I can’t judge it against the field, but, it has a 10% chance right now (shortlist hasn’t been announced), and based on these qualities, I’ll bump it up to 15% (and may adjust this later).

Your Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

To mark the release of Dubravka Ugresic’s final book,����(translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać)—order it now from , or your local indie bookstore!—we thought we’d share an excerpt, which you’ll find below.

As a bit of context, this book is a conversation between Dubravka and Mermima Omeragić, although to be honest, it reads a bit more like a guided monologue. A lot of Dubravka’s typical themes are presented here—exile, writing in a “small language,” the evils of nationalism, the workings of the literary world—but this isn’t some sort of rehash or greatest hits. Knowing that this was likely going to be her final work, there’s a sense of Dubravka looking toward the future, which makes this book all the more compelling.

The bit below is from a section entitled, “The Melancholy of Vanishing,” and before we get to it, grant me one selfish aside. As you’ll see below, Dubravka alludes to an event at Powells bookstore (arranged by the amazing Jeremy Garber), and where Pilar Adón gave a reading last week. I mention that, because on several occasions, Dubravka told me she wanted me to meet her “Spanish publishers.” She never named them, and it took me far too long to realize that are Pilar and her husband Enrique! Literature is a small world.

Well, let’s get on with it:

Through many of your books runs the melancholy of vanishing. Is a happy literary outcome even possible?

I just read a report in the news about online auctions of the late Sylvia Plath’s belongings. At one auction (Your Own Sylvia) a deck of tarot cards that Ted Hughes had given to Plath was sold for $200,000. The fifty-odd items sold at auction broughtPlath’s heir, Frieda Hughes, over $1,000,000. Among them was a particularly impressive rolling pin. Quite recently a Scottish miniskirt of Sylvia Plath’s was sold at auction. The description of the skirt was much semantically richer than the reviews of the poet’s poems had ever been: “The skirt represents Plath and her personality in every way—the conflict inside, her inner art monster, cloaked by the most precise, nearly persnickety, clothes. (. . .) Plath was miserable, but she created art, and the skirt is a representation of that struggle.” I read these and other news items as if they are symbolic eulogies. Who actually died here? Literature died. At a moment when those who are nameless, the amateurs, the influencers, male and female, the politicians and porn stars, the writers and artists, the media gurus all become stars, when the genres of tell-all books, autobiography, and media-profiling have overshadowed the literary work, when The Life and Work of X is reduced to The Life of X, when what the author, male or female, wrote becomes irrelevant as long as their “product,” their “work,” refreshes the world and makes a difference, this is the moment when the death throes begin for the traditional concept of literature. If literature is to survive it must move into a zone of invisibility and go underground.

This moment seems the most narcissistic in the history of civilization. Today writers are writing their own hagiographies, or kickstarting their career by writing their own hagiography. In so doing they radically change the very essence of literature, even while being unaware of this, and mostly they are unaware. Consequently, they spur readers to write their own. And their readers have no need to tear their hair out over this—there are professional companies where nameless professionals are ready to tackle the job for them. Therefore, things are far deeper and more complex than they might seem at first glance. I won’t be far off the mark, or so I hope, if I say that the key word in our contemporary vocabulary is—archive. More than a mere word, archive is diagnosis. Diagnosis is—to use an old term expunged from our current usage—weltschmertz, world pain, with unusual symptoms. We are all of us affected by a hysterical drive to leave traces of our personal existence on the planet Earth. This narcissistic hysteria is evaluated as a positive, as success, and, in the realm of literature, as artistic success. However, the Booker Prize has not appeased the anxiety of the successee, because in success the Booker has been far outstripped by the producer of little bottles filled with one’s individual farts. Everyone has the right to leave their trace. Everyone is able to leave their trace. Traces draw attention to the fact that we exist, that we will not be erased. Therefore all evaluation is pointless, because the producer of fart jars and the author of a novel that has been awarded the Booker Prize end up equally forgotten. They will be pushed aside by a flood of new creative people, influencers, visual artists, writers, actresses selling candles perfumed with the scent of their own vaginas. They are all seeking, in a frenzy, the best possible way to leave a trace of their existence. Whence this fear of erasure, the possible disappearance of civilization? As far as literature is concerned, this fear has found its home in the genre that will be their salvation. Hagiography. Thanks to the indestructible wedding of democracy and digitalization, people can depart this world as saints. So it is that literature itself, in its mainstream, is being whittled down to a single genre, the hagiography (autobiography, autofiction), and so it is that the author, fraught by fear of disappearance, nullity, the loss of the importance of their work, the reduction of their efforts to laboring on an assembly line, step back from their text and become their own text. Their name matters more than the title of their work. Here I recall the statement of a serial killer who snorted in frustration: “Hey, how many times do I have to kill before I make it to the front page?!” Yet, who can guarantee that our lives are authentic? Who can guarantee that the saints really were saints? There is a weird company in Japan. Ingenious documentary-filmmaker Werner Herzog made the film Family Romance about it in 2019. The company provides an array of services. The client can hire people who will attend the funeral of a deceased who had no family. People can be hired to act as marital partners for those who need this kind of support (pornography, prostitution, sex are strictly prohibited). Werner Herzog zeroes in on the case of a little girl who has no father. Her mother contacts the Family Romance company. The owner spends time with the little girl, ultimately the girl opens up to him, begins to think of him as her real father. Her mother asks their rental dad to move in with them. The business owner refuses because this is not part of the deal. The end of the movie discloses a sad truth, the business owner is not part of the life of his own family. If his own family needs a father, they can only hire one.

Literature is not a toy in the hands of male or female writing egos. Literature must not (nor can it!) be placed under the control of national literatures, various ministries of culture, academies, publishers and all those bureaucratic institutions that have latched onto literature with the excuse of giving it room to breathe, yet in fact seeing to its “esteemed” demise. Literature is communication between me and those of my readers who cannot be bought, no matter who and where they are. Recently a reader from somewhere in Chile messaged me to say he had COVID and was reading my novel, Fox. He is my authentic reader. How do I know? I simply do.

Literature is what happens between me and a reader I have never met somewhere in India who discovered something in my text that I wasn’t myself aware of. Literature is what happens between me and a reader who showed up at a sparsely attended reading in Portland, bringing copies of all of my books that have

appeared in English translations, and showed that he knew by heart the most minute details which I, myself, no longer remembered. We all of us depend on the “kindness of strangers” (Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers)��like tragic Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire. Literature is a non-utilitarian activity. But one real reader is enough to persuade me of the meaningfulness of my work. Mystical are the paths of literature.

And while we’re on the subject of literary anticipation, Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 and the unforgettable movie version, directed by François Truffaut, have been permanently etched in my memory. In the final scenes we discover the existence of a literary underground, hiding in a forest. Since possession of books is strictly banned in Bradbury’s dystopian world, the book-people have chosen to live in a parallel world. This sort of scenography does not invoke vanishing but the inkling of a new life, of revolution. The book-people are members of an underground intellectual resistance movement, where each of them commits an entire book to memory. The book-people are living libraries. The only library that exists. Who knows, perhaps a reader will appear who will choose one of my books, thereby postponing my inevitable demise. Perhaps near the end of their life, this imagined woman-book or man-book will exhale my book into the mouth of someone else, and this person will, having lived their life, pass it on to yet another. Do I believe that in the very rhythm of inhaling and exhaling lies the meaning of literature? Is any other meaning necessary? Inhalation and exhalation—life itself. With the first breath it begins, with the last it ends.

A Muzzle for Witches��is available from , , and better bookstores everywhere!

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If you’re reading this before September 1st, please be aware that��Of Beasts and Fowls��is currently 40% off thanks to our Women in Translation Month sale!

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“A funerary poem about a bird flying underground; a psychodrama of two sisters drowning in the mirror of memory; a center of a necrophilic labyrinth; Virginia Woolf’s Rhoda lost in John Hawkes’s��Travesty. Pilar Adon’s novel is the most haunting I have read in years.”—Mircea Cărtărescu, winner of the Dublin Literary Award

Summer is ending and Coro, an artist frightened of what her paintings of her dead sister may represent, gets in her car one night and starts to drive, with no plan or destination.��After a wrong turn down a narrow dirt road, she runs out of gas outside the gates of a large and isolated house called Bethany, a place inhabited exclusively by a small group of women who seem to exist in a closed, hierarchical system a world apart. The women of Bethany live closely with the natural and animal world, celebrate rites and rituals, and, like devotees of an ancestral cult, all dress the same. Most unsettlingly, they seem to know who Coro is already. In fact, they have been expecting her.

How the women came to live in Bethany, why they believe Coro is destined to be there, and most pressing, why won’t they let her leave are questions Coro must face as she struggles between the instinct to escape and the sense that something larger is at work.

When Bethany’s careful balance is disturbed—with violent consequences—by the appearance of a mysterious man who claims the house and land are his, Coro will find herself forced to meet her own ghosts, reckon with her choices, and accept that Bethany might just be where she belongs.

Winner of Spain’s��Premio Nacional��de Narrativa in 2023,����introduces a grand talent new to English audiences in a haunting novel rife with natural descriptions, signs and symbols, and a sense of the uncanny.

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Pilar Adón��was born in Madrid in 1971 and is the author of four novels, including��The Mayflies��(forthcoming from Open Letter), several short story collection, and four volumes of poetry. She received the Ojo Critico Prize for��Viajes inocentes, and won the Premio Francisco Umbral al Libro del Año, Premio Cálamo, and the Premio de la Critica for��Of Beasts and Fowls.

Katie Whittemore��translates from the Spanish. Full-length translations include works by��Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durán, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, and Katixa Agirre. Forthcoming translations include novels by Jon Bilbao, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Almudena Sánchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adón. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 to translate Moreno’s��In Case We Lose Power, and was a finalist for the Spain-USA Prize for her translation of Katixa Agirre’s��Mothers Don’t.