This week, our editors recommend longreads by Benjamin Wofford, Josh Dzieza, Evan Osnos, Alice Wong & Ed Yong, and Dan Kois.
fiction
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Great Fiction of AI
Can artificial intelligence write novels? Josh Dzieza looks at how independent authors have begun to experiment with AI writing programs like Sudowrite and Jasper to write their stories faster. The piece explores questions around ethics and authorship, and its design is A+. It requires a strange degree of sympathy with the machine, thinking about the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘The Ways of Fiction Are Devious Indeed’
“Finding current relevancy—and outrage—in the accusations of plagiarism that have long haunted a classic of the West: Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.”
Posted inQuotes
The Unlikely Hero in George Saunders’ Short Story, ‘The Falls’
And he “…stopped in his tracks, wondering what in the world two little girls were doing alone in a canoe speeding toward the Falls, apparently oarless.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Falls
“Come to think of it, it was possible, even probable, that the boat had already gone over the Falls or hit the Snag.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Into the Belly of the Whale With Sjón
“His books dance — with light, quick steps, never breaking eye contact — all over the line between the mythic and the mundane.”
Posted inQuotes
Going into Starbucks to Order Butter Tea
“Pema wants to ask Jamal, Have you seen the news? But of course he hasn’t. He’s got other things to think about and now so does she.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Butter Tea at Starbucks
“The flames flap with a noise like laundry on a line. The fire is an orange column. A plastic bag pirouettes in mid-air. The camera, unsteady, lingers and lingers. And in the middle, the figure stands upright, stoic or suicidal. Pema thinks: she’s already dead.”
Posted inStory
Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2022
Longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj read and shared 276 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2021. Here are his favorites.
Posted inEditor's Pick
John Updike, His Stories, and Me
“But now I’ve been a writer for 30 years, I can understand the impulses that I and he and probably every other writer have: to go after a subject we’re compelled by.”