Footnotes, February 2023: Book links from around the web
At The Reading List, we’re trainspotters when it comes to interesting book links, and here are a number that caught our eye.
- Clarkesworld, one of the most prestigious publishers of science fiction short stories, has had to close submissions after a deluge of AI-generated stories.
- Meanwhile, ChatGPT-written books are flooding Amazon as people turn to AI for quick publishing. Over 200 ebooks – including poetry – in Amazon’s Kindle store list ChatGPT as an author or co-author, and the number is rising daily.
- But it’s not all bad in the world of tech. Sweet old man Lloyd Richards’ mystery novel Stone Maidens was a flop for 11 years, but his daughter’s 12-second TikTok video finally turned it into a hit.
- Feel good alert: Years after her death, science-fiction writer Octavia E Butler has found herself on the bestseller list again.
- The Roald Dahl saga continues, with spokespeople for his US and European Publishers saying they have ‘no plans’ to revise the text of his books in those territories.
- I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai – a novel that confronts our true-crime obsession, depicting the charms of the murder podcast while evading its flaws.
- Good news! Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson is coming out of retirement to publish a darker, more adult work of graphic literature.
- On the one hand, TikTok’s Book Influencers Are Sucking The Joy Out Of Reading.
- On the other, There’s Really No Wrong Way To Read a Book.
- Looming apocalypse. Paranoid conspiracies. Rocket-obsessed oligarchs. We’re all living under Gravity’s Rainbow. As Thomas Pynchon’s novel turns 50, its world feels unnervingly present.
- A forensic study has found that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was poisoned when he died, days after Chile’s military coup.
- If you follow film or literary twitter at all, then you’re feed has been filled with people debating if sex scenes are ‘necessary’. According to Lincoln Michel: The Unnecessary Is the Only Thing Necessary in Art.
- And finally, read an exclusive excerpt from A Little Light, the forthcoming collection of short stories by Nthikeng Mohlele.
Header image: Rock’n Roll Monkey/Unsplash
Categories Fiction International South Africa
Tags Footnotes
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