Sam Austen's Blog

So here, in the cracked electric theater of American confession, comes Lindy West hauling her soul into the town square, and the crowd, drunk on its own righteousness, mistakes gawking for judgment and judgment for wisdom. They chatter about desire, humiliation, power, arrangement, consent—as though the modern marriage weren't already a madhouse with lesser upholstery.

Nelio Biedermann, the 22-year-old Swiss wunderkind whose debut novel, Lázár, was just released in English, has been compared to every author under the sun, from ⁠Márquez to Mann⁠. Does his output really measure up, or are Biedermann's publicists just banking on American readers not knowing who Thomas Mann is?

Helen DeWitt’s decision to avoid the trappings of modernity that come with being a literary grantee have cost her the $175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize. The upside? No irritating Zoom calls, podcasts, or social posts—the shunned DeWitt gets to focus writing. The downside? None.

There is something splendidly deranged in watching a small indie press marshal the full battery of slop-cannons—Twitter astroturfing, merch drops, the whole hypersaturated liturgy of suspect UGC—as if the reissue of an obscure thirty-year-old novel were the next phase of the Marvel Extended Universe.

Ben Lerner has done something almost impossible in Transcription: he has made the novel dangerous again, restored both as argument and apparition, memory and fraud, broken machine and user error.

Ocean Vuong argues that enervation of literary style began with the newspaper, eventually finding its way into universities and literary workshops. AI merely reveals the pervasiveness of today’s “merely communicative” approach. Better writing comes, he explains, when authors value intuition over precision. This podcast demolishes Vuong’s position by presenting an excerpt from the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.

Last week, ⁠Hachette⁠ made an unprecedented move for a Big Five publisher, cancelling the US release of Mia Ballard's Shy Girl and pulling the UK edition over⁠ allegations of heavy AI assistance ⁠in the creation of the text. The author and publisher, in the midst of what's sure to be an illuminating legal battle, are being cagey about details, but online comments indicate that large portions of the book are "unreadable," "AI slop," and "make no sense."

In this podcast, we examine the thought process behind the viral hit Meow: A Novel, which is surprisingly close to Andreessen’s own. 

Booksellers can now stock up on The Meow Library's Wuthering Heights: 350+ pages of "meow," and nothing but "meow."

Debate rages across Twitter as professor and novelist ⁠Aaron Gwyn⁠ insists that his college-level fiction writing students ⁠can't name a single novelist⁠, living or dead. Can you say literacy crisis?