“Has evolution really managed to culminate in this? This spoon, this cup, this plate; us, here.”1 Helen Phillips’ The Beautiful Bureaucrat documents the brief period during which its protagonist, Josephine…
Contemporaries Essays
Shadows of the Occupation: Wendy Trevino’s “Sonnets for Brass Knuckles Doodles” and Nonprofit Epistemology
“The same ‘reason’ I thought I could help change the world is the ‘reason’ I thought the sonnet form would lead to a ‘conclusion.'” — Bernadette Mayer, author’s note to…
“Unsevered is Not a Word”: Anti-work Beyond the Office in Severance
Severance is one of the most uncompromising anti-work shows to appear on TV, turning office comedy cringe to explicit horror. A nightmare masked as fantasy, Severance asks: what if we…
False Premises: Tabitha Lasley’s Sea State
Tabitha Lasley’s Sea State — a memoir so unreliable that it appears dishonest, so thieving it has been clubbed into a series of “backdoor memoirs” — traffics in the oily,…
Introduction: Anti-Work Aesthetics
There’s nothing new about the hatred of work. So long as there has been work, work has always been hell, and workers have always known it. Working conditions transform, innovating…
Breakfast with AlgoBooks: Meet the Future of Reader Recommendation
The naughty algorithm, the chaotic algorithm, the baby algorithm who is still learning, the “dumb,” unnuanced algorithm. All these are “algorithm adjectives,” real terms we have observed in use at…
BookTok and the Rituals of Recommendation
If you’ve walked into your local Barnes & Noble bookstore recently, you likely encountered a table of BookTok books like the one pictured in Figure 1. Part book club, part…
Reading Like Rory: Post-Digital Reading on BookTok
Like many others, I downloaded TikTok during the pandemic. I’d seen the headlines touting its uncanny ability to personalize the content users see and was wary of getting sucked into…
SEO and the essay: what does it tell us about “AI”-generated text and literary culture?
Following the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 (and then Google’s Bard and GPT4 in March 20223), many have speculated about how “AI” prompt-generated text is reconfiguring our…
Third Person Random
The US translation market is notoriously difficult to measure, but common publishing knowledge contends that only about 3% of books published in the US are translations. If you are interested…