Welcome to As we speak in Books, our each day round-up of literary headlines on the intersection of politics, tradition, media, and extra.
The Most Attention-grabbing AI-Generated Story But
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, touted a narrative “written” by their LLM is response to the immediate: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” The ensuing story is, I feel it’s honest to say, essentially the most attention-grabbing “creative writing” product I’ve seen, and never as a result of it’s essentially good, however as a result of it’s apparently messy, believable, and never with out some virtues. Lincoln Michel goes sentence-level deep right here,and I discovered myself nodding alongside to most of his evaluation. In my opinion, it fall right into a literary uncanny valley, neither unhealthy sufficient to be laughable nor ok to be “lifelike.” The strangeness of it’s then all of the extra compelling and disturbing.
The 2025 Nationwide E-book Critics Circle Award Winners Introduced
The massive story is that James didn’t the truth is win within the fiction class. The winner, which I’ve not learn so I’ll withold any “but whyyyyyy” reactions, is My Buddies by Hisham Matar. It’s been in and round a number of awards so I wouldn’t say it’s a shock essentially. No wait, I feel it truly sort of is. Challenger profitable in Nonfiction and There’s At all times This Yr in Criticism (nonetheless a puzzle why it’s there) are terrific outcomes. Full listing of winners, together with Finest First E-book and Translation, listed right here.
