Publishing

Time and the Novel

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In her interview with Robert Lee Brewer of Writer’s Digest on 19 July 2026, Julie Burtin says that time is an underrated ingredient in the creation of a novel.

Julie Burtin

Julie Buntin‘s debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, released in 10 territories worldwide, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including The Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. She is the co-editor of Notes to New Mothers, a collection of dispatches from postpartum life by sixty writers and artists. Previously, Buntin was an editor and director of writing programs at Catapult. Now, she writes and teaches in Ann Arbor, where she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. 

What prompted you to write this book?

I was haunted by a lot of experiences from my girlhood and early adulthood, particularly moments when, instead of standing up for myself, I’d chosen instead to make myself smaller. I grew up with an absent father and was interested in tracing the way not knowing the answer to such a formative question about one’s identity—where do I come from?—might turn a young woman into a seeker, and how easy it would be for her to look for the answer in all the wrong places.

In the post #MeToo landscape of 2019, I was also still processing the fact that my professional life was built upon affiliations with institutions, many of which hid a rotten man or several at their core. As a writer, I’m really drawn to things I can’t make sense of, experiences I’ve had or things I’ve observed that have some unresolvable contradiction in them. I came to this book from that place, trying to parse what it meant to have been in some ways complicit in the same structures that held me back.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

About seven years. I started the novel in May of 2019 and it’s out this summer. It was in production for the last year-ish, so that’s about six years of writing, with some long breaks after the births of each of my children. Those breaks were an interesting part of the process with this book—I found that when I returned to the novel, it felt like something another me had written, which made it easier to do big, transformative revisions along the way, including adding a middle section from the perspective of a peripheral character that I then cut after my second kid was born. The general shape of the book stayed pretty consistent over time, but how I approached it underwent a ton of change.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

It’s been interesting to learn how much the publishing industry has changed since I last published a book in 2017. There are far fewer outlets for reviews, and traditional media coverage seems harder to crack than ever. But it’s been heartening to see how much fascinating, smart discourse there is about literature online, particularly on Substack. I have been (truly) living under a rock in the Midwest with only infants and grad students for company for some time, and when I joined Substack a couple of months ago I had a digital version of the feeling I used to get in NYC at good book parties. A sense of having stumbled into the most interesting conversation around. 

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I was surprised by how long it took, and how much motherhood and teaching slowed me down, while also adding new dimensions to how I think about fiction and writing and life.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

Will is a character who makes frustrating decisions, particularly about her relationships with men and her sense of her own value. As I wrote I tried, as much as possible and to the extent that it made sense for the characters/story, to steer toward complexity, nuance. I hope that the book provokes reflection, strong reactions, conversation. That it’s the kind of text that you want to discuss with someone else—that in the things it leaves unresolved, it forces the reader to come to new and perhaps surprising conclusions.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Time is an underrated ingredient in the making of a novel; I’m not talking about internal time, the clock that composes the architecture of the book (though of course that’s crucial), I’m talking about the time of writing it. How long it takes, how much life you live as you undergo it, and how you change, also changes the book. Some books need more or less time—try to honor that, and be patient with yourself and your project if you find you’re embedded in something that needs more of your life to work itself out.

Role of a Book Cover?

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Madelyn Johnson has an article on the Literary Hub website, dated yesteday, which explores some of the roles of the cover of a book.

Madelyn Johnson is currently the Coordinator for the Art Department at HarperCollins Publishers. She is also an essayist, playwright, and poet based in New York City. Her written work has appeared in Dreamworldgirl Zine, Local Wolves, and Luxury Literature, among others. You can find her on Substack @madelynmay.substack

Madelyn Johnson

Ms Johnson wrote: “I work in the Art Department at HarperCollins, where I have a front-row seat to the conversations that shape how books appear in the world. What kind of cover art reads as “literary” versus “commercial,” what signals a “book club book,” what feels “serious” versus “friendly,” and increasingly, how to make a cover socially legible online. Covers today are expected not only to attract readers in bookstores, but to circulate fluidly through Instagram posts, TikToks, Substack photos, and carefully curated apartment interiors. Books are now asked to function simultaneously as texts and as lifestyle objects, and designers are now tasked with imagining multiple scales of reach simultaneously, from the bookstore table to the phone screen.

In the before times, a cover served primarily as an interpretation of the text: a visual invitation intended to both entice readers and help them understand the book’s content. When working on a new cover, designers would ask themselves: What is this novel? What emotional experience does it promise? These were the questions they attempted to answer though their work.

Today, another question has quietly entered the designer’s studio: How does the reader of this book want to be perceived? Or more bluntly: Who do they want to be?

These questions do not replace the original brief, but they do increasingly compete with it, in a shift that has placed a new but largely unspoken pressure on book cover designers. A cover no longer simply needs to communicate genre or tone. It must also construct an identity that a reader of that book can inhabit. If book covers once translated text for their readers, they now operate in reverse: translating readers for their audiences. In this context, the old adage has been inverted from don’t judge a book by its cover to judge a reader by the covers on their books.

Inside publishing, this shift is often discussed indirectly. We talk about whether a cover feels like its intended reader, whether it’s “shareable,” whether it has enough “pop” to draw the eye, whether the cover can be easily made into merch, whether it reaches younger readers, or whether it looks too academic, too commercial, too feminine, too masculine. These are practical marketing conversations, but beneath them sits a larger cultural assumption: that readers increasingly relate to books as images before (if ever) they encounter them as texts.

Perhaps that’s only to be expected. As Olivia McGiff, Assistant Art Director at HarperCollins, put it to me, “There are plenty of times where, if I were to come into a cover meeting midway without context, the discourse could be mistaken for a very different kind of aesthetic grooming. ‘That one looks too angry. I like the friendlier ones, it’s more inviting.’ ‘I’d actually pick that one up, the other is too harsh and serious.’ ‘I just want it to be pretty, not too sad.’ Change the pronouns and we’re at a bar in Murray Hill.”

The contrast between contemporary commercial fiction and prestige literary fiction makes these efforts especially visible. An Emily Henry novel announces warmth, wit, emotional accessibility, and optimism through bright palettes, graphic illustration, and playful typography. Elena Ferrante’s redesigned novels, by contrast, often perform seriousness through restraint: muted colors, sparse compositions, elegant type, and an almost studied refusal of trendiness. Neither approach is simply about the novel itself. Each constructs a reader profile. One imagines someone who wants to feel—and appear—contemporary and stylish; the other imagines someone who wants to seem effortless and understated.

Appear and seem to whom, you ask? Who exactly is this imagined social identity for? Why, the internet, of course.

Social media has become a culture of constant public self-curation in which nearly every visible object becomes part of one’s identity construction. Books now function alongside clothing, furniture, skincare products, and playlists as aesthetic building blocks of who someone is or—or at least how they want to be perceived. Compared to many lifestyle objects, however, books carry an additional moral and intellectual load. Books suggest education, interiority, discipline, and sensitivity. Or at least, they implies the performance of those qualities. I say books, but of course, what I really mean is book covers: the outward-facing surface of reading itself, which is the only thing truly communicated by these images. And like fashion or beauty, that surface is deeply shaped by gendered expectations about how intelligence, emotion, and taste should appear in public.

Consider the figure of the “cool girl” reader: effortlessly intelligent, casually literary, emotionally fluent but never overwhelming. Think of Kaia Gerber’s widely publicized Library Science book club, Miu Miu’s Literary Club events in Milan, or Instagram accounts like @coolgirlsreading, where books are framed less as intellectual engagements than as extensions of an already aspirational lifestyle. Intelligence appears ambient. Literary taste functions as texture. The book becomes part of a broader visual vocabulary of effortless (but always rich, and always hot) sophistication: Lit Hub Joan Didion tote bags, annotated paperbacks, expensive knitwear, iced coffee balanced beside a copy of The Bell Jar.

Even if you have never read The Bell Jar, contemporary cover redesigns tell you exactly what kind of reader the book imagines. Curved lettering, retro color palettes, soft illustrations, and new forewords by literary “it girls” position the novel less as a text and more of an accessory to an easily recognizable feminine character: sad, hot, intelligent, aesthetically composed yet messy. The Girl, Interrupted girl. The book becomes part of the costume of a specific kind of performance.

Once that happens, readers themselves begin to feel categorized by the books they carry. Certain genres, authors, and visual styles come to imply entire social identities before a single page has been opened. The risk is not simply performative reading. It is that literary curiosity itself narrows. Readers become less willing to choose books that do not fit the identities their shelves, feeds, or public selves have already established.

Book cover design now operates within the same economies of aspiration, branding, and self-curation that shape fashion. A successful cover must now communicate not only what a novel means, but what being seen with that novel means. When literature becomes valuable primarily as social aesthetic, the danger is not superficiality alone. It is the gradual replacement of intellectual curiosity with brand alignment, of private engagement with public performance, and of reading itself with the appearance of being the kind of person who reads.”

The Author or AI: Who Wrote It?

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There is an article on the Literary News website by Ashish for Literature News on a major controversy affecting the future of literature.

Ashish writes, “In March 2026, the publishing world found itself confronting one of its most unsettling questions yet: what happens when the boundary between human creativity and machine-generated content becomes indistinct? The controversy surrounding Shy Girl, a horror novel by Mia Ballard, brought this question into sharp and uncomfortable focus. Originally published in the United Kingdom in late 2025, the book was scheduled for a wider release in the United States through Hachette Book Group. That release was abruptly halted. The publisher not only withdrew the American edition but also discontinued the UK version, a decision that signalled far more than routine editorial reconsideration. It marked a moment of deep institutional anxiety about authorship, authenticity and the future of literary production.

The immediate trigger for this withdrawal was a wave of online scrutiny that questioned the originality of the text. Analysts and readers began to examine the novel closely, with some claiming that a significant portion of the work bore the hallmarks of AI-generated writing. One widely circulated estimate suggested that as much as 78 per cent of the text could have been produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence. Whether or not such figures can be verified with precision is almost beside the point. What matters is that the perception of machine authorship was strong enough to compel one of the world’s largest publishing houses to take decisive action.

Hachette’s public response was carefully worded but unmistakably firm. The company reiterated its commitment to “original creative expression,” a phrase that now carries new weight in an industry increasingly shaped by technological intervention. The withdrawal of Shy Girl was not framed as a punitive measure against an individual author, but as a defence of a principle. Yet beneath this measured language lies a deeper uncertainty. What exactly constitutes originality in an era where writers may use AI tools for drafting, editing, or ideation? And where should publishers draw the line between assistance and authorship?

Mia Ballard, for her part, strongly denied that the novel was primarily generated by artificial intelligence. She attributed the controversy to earlier versions of the manuscript, suggesting that an editor associated with a self-published edition may have introduced AI-generated material without her full awareness. Ballard also indicated that she was considering legal action, arguing that the allegations had damaged her reputation and professional standing. Beyond the legal and professional dimensions, there were also human consequences. Reports suggested that the intense scrutiny and public criticism had taken a toll on her mental health, highlighting the personal cost of a controversy that quickly escalated beyond the confines of literary debate.

The Shy Girl episode has unsettled the publishing industry not simply because of the specifics of the case, but because of what it reveals about the fragility of existing frameworks. For decades, publishing has relied on a relatively stable understanding of authorship. A book was assumed to be the product of a human mind, shaped through imagination, labour and revision. AI disrupts that assumption at its core. It introduces the possibility that a text may be partially or substantially generated by systems trained on vast corpora of existing literature, raising questions about originality, ownership and ethical responsibility.

What has sent what many insiders describe as a “cold shiver” through the industry is the realisation that detection itself is uncertain. Unlike plagiarism, which can often be identified through direct textual comparison, AI-generated content does not necessarily replicate existing passages. It produces new combinations, making it far more difficult to prove or disprove machine involvement. This ambiguity places publishers in a precarious position. Act too late, and they risk reputational damage. Act too quickly, and they risk penalising authors without conclusive evidence.

The controversy has also exposed a widening gap between technological capability and institutional preparedness. Writers are already experimenting with AI tools in various ways, from brainstorming ideas to refining prose. Some view these tools as extensions of the creative process, analogous to earlier technological shifts such as word processors or digital research databases. Others see them as fundamentally different, arguing that AI introduces an external agency into what has traditionally been an intensely personal act of creation. The industry has yet to arrive at a consensus, and the Shy Girl case demonstrates how urgently such a consensus is needed.

From an editorial standpoint, the incident raises uncomfortable but necessary questions. Should publishers require full disclosure of AI usage in manuscripts? If so, how detailed should that disclosure be? Is there a threshold beyond which a work ceases to be considered authentically human? And perhaps most critically, how can these standards be enforced in a way that is both fair and transparent? At present, there are few clear answers. What exists instead is a growing recognition that the rules governing literary production are being rewritten in real time.

There is also a cultural dimension to this debate that cannot be ignored. Literature has long been valued not only for its aesthetic qualities but for its human origins. Readers engage with books as expressions of individual consciousness, shaped by lived experience and emotional depth. The suspicion that a work may be largely machine-generated disrupts that relationship. It introduces a layer of doubt that affects not only the text itself but the reader’s trust in the publishing ecosystem as a whole.

At the same time, it would be simplistic to frame the issue as a binary conflict between human and machine. The reality is more complex. AI tools are already embedded in many aspects of writing and publishing, from grammar checking to market analysis. The challenge lies in distinguishing between augmentation and substitution, between tools that support creativity and systems that replace it. The Shy Girl controversy forces the industry to confront this distinction with a level of urgency it can no longer defer.

In many ways, this incident may prove to be a turning point. It has compelled publishers, authors and readers to engage with questions that were previously theoretical, and perhaps never thought of in the board meetings. It has exposed vulnerabilities in editorial processes and highlighted the need for clearer ethical guidelines. Most importantly, it has underscored the value of transparency. In an environment where the origins of a text can no longer be taken for granted, openness about the creative process may become as important as the work itself.

Also, let me pose an even broader question. Why are publishers fearing AI-generated text? If the ultimate goal of reading is extracting pleasure and feeling relieved, why should an issue be made of the origin of the text? As far as the text is providing us with reading pleasure, I would refrain from getting into the depths of the genesis. Yes, the opinions may vary, and serious readers (as well as critics) may pose even serious questions. However, it needs to be debated with openness in mind rather than cancelling the AI-text.

For now, the fate of Shy Girl remains a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that the publishing industry is entering a period of profound transformation, one in which the definition of authorship itself is under negotiation. The anxiety it has generated is not merely about one book or one author. It is about the future of literature in an age where the line between human imagination and artificial generation is becoming increasingly difficult to discern.”

? Book Prizes ?

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There is an article (quite long, but I have abbreviated it below) on Rebecca Makkai’s substack dated 2 June 2026 with the title “Book Prizes Don’t Work How You Think”.

.Rebecca Makkai is an American novelist and short story writer. She is best known for writing The Great Believers and I Have Some Questions for You, which have been positively received by critics and won awards such as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Libby Book Award.

Rebecca Makkia

She says, “I want to start by preventing some heart attacks and assuring the administrators of every book prize I’ve ever judged that I am NOT about to disclose any secrets of the judging room.

But authors and readers (and even editors) tend to have enormous, if understandable, misconceptions of how the prize-judging process works, and I’m happy to clear some of them up.

If I’m counting right, I’ve judged six book prizes in the past eight years, which is RIDICULOUS and no one in their right mind would ever do this. By “book prize,” I mean the kind where a panel of judges reads many, many published and eligible books and then comes up sometimes with a longlist, usually with a shortlist, and (almost) always with a winner. These would be prizes like the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, Canada’s Giller Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award—all of which, for confoundingly masochistic reasons, I’ve judged. (I was absolutely thrilled to be the chair of the Pulitzer fiction jury this year, and I’ll say more about that below.)

There are other kinds of prizes, too. There are ones where one single judge is sent three published books and picks a winner for, say, a state book of the year. There are others where a single judge reads a bunch of finalist manuscripts and picks one to get published by a small press. There’s the kind of prize you get when you’re a kid and you read twenty-five books in one summer and the library lets you pick out any book and they’ll order it for you, and of course this is the best possible prize in the entire literary world.

Every year, speculation articles appear with people guessing winners (for the Pulitzer and National Book Award and Booker in particular) based on absolutely irrelevant factors like whether an entirely different jury liked this author’s last book five years ago, or whether this book was on other juries’ lists for other prizes. Any article that gets people talking about books is a great thing, but the speculation part is, I hate to say it, useless.

Here are the things I’ve learned by judging.

There’s no “they”

Book prizes are nearly always judged not by the organizations that administer them but by small groups (usually 3 or 5) of authors and, occasionally, critics or booksellers. The organization itself (usually a small, underfunded but valiant nonprofit—yes, even the very famous organizations) is usually responsible only for screening submissions for eligibility: Was the book published this year, does the author live in the US, is the author indeed under 35 or Jewish or a debut short story writer?

In every prize I’ve ever judged or heard firsthand reports of, everything else is up to the judges and their idiosyncrasies. There’s no input from anyone else. The heads of these organizations often learn the winner at the same moment the rest of the world does.

So what the NBA* judges liked LAST time is completely irrelevant. The same five authors could just as easily be picked to judge the NBA as to judge the Pulitzer or the Story Prize, and what organization they’re attached to would have little bearing on the results. (Which makes it funny that there are vastly different levels of prestige associated with different prizes, right?)

I think this is healthy for authors to understand. Not being a finalist for something doesn’t mean that a whole organization found you lacking. It means that three or five individual human judges with idiosyncratic tastes didn’t mutually judge yours to be one of the very, very top books in the pile.

*I’m just going to say NBA throughout this article and trust that you aren’t picturing LeBron.

There’s an 11th place

Every time a longlist of ten books comes out, there was an 11th place book that almost, almost made the list. Three Pulitzer finalists are made public, but of course there’s always a fourth choice, and fifth, and sixth. And (unless an unscrupulous judge gets drunk and spills the beans at a party) those authors will never know it.

As a judge, this kills me. Someone’s life would have been changed, but just barely wasn’t. Someone out there is wondering if it’s all worth it, never knowing that judges fell madly in love with their work and were gutted not to be able to highlight it.

There are so, so many books

For a small ($0 to $500 to $5000) honorarium, you’re expected to get to hundreds of books within about a six-month period. Some prizes just ask you to read twenty books, or read what appeals to you, but the biggest book prizes can receive up to 600 valid submissions. This means two things, and I don’t think I’m revealing state secrets here: 1) Not every judge can look at every single book; and 2) When a judge realizes they don’t love a book, they can put it down.

I’ll touch more on the first point below. If the second point sounds unfair to you, I’ll explain below the breadth of what gets sent in… But also, listen, if the first paragraph of a novel is very bad (and so that I don’t hurt your feelings, let’s suppose it’s awkward, ungrammatical, sexist, opaque, and full of conspiracy theories)—why on earth would I continue reading in the hopes that somehow this book will become magically brilliant, brilliant enough to make up for that paragraph and be the winner of this major award? I have 100 other books to get to. I am not a fast reader. (In my experience, most writers aren’t.) Any good reason to put a book down is a blessing.

In most cases, judges split up the first round of reading, weeding out things they don’t want to consider and passing along to the group the ones they like. There are different ways of splitting the list—alphabetically, by interest, at random—but usually the best practice is to divide and conquer. Even so, depending on the number of submissions and the number of judges, each person might be personally responsible for 200 books. This means reading nonstop, screening things on audio when you shower, picking up your e-reader at red lights, bringing ten Advance Reader Copies for a weekend at your in-laws’.

While I do know one judge who claims to have read at least 20 pages into every single one of the 500 submissions for a major prize, he took a sabbatical to do it. Poetry judges have it the easiest; one poem can tell you a lot about whether to continue reading. YA judges at least have shorter books. Judges of adult fiction and nonfiction have by far the most work.

This means your book is always going to be a victim of fate

Not every book can be read under the ideal circumstances (hammock, margarita), and it’s also entirely possible that while four of the five judges would have loved your book, your first reader happens to be the one judge who really doesn’t connect with it and won’t pass it on.

Each panel of judges has its own ethos

While some prizes stipulate specific criteria (the Pulitzer fiction guidelines, for instance, state that the prize will preferably go to a book “dealing with American life”), most panels of judges are simply told to pick the best book of the year. That’s regardless of the author’s track record or fame or reputation. Simply the best book.

But what does that mean?

Judges usually communicate (on Zoom, and/or via spreadsheets and emails) throughout the process, and often at some point define their own criteria. Are they simply looking for the best-executed book in their genre? Or the most innovative? The book that everyone should still be reading in fifty years? The book that affected them the most?

And then there’s just the alchemy of the group itself. On one panel, we all discovered we’d grown up on farms* and so we were particularly drawn, as a group, to agriculturally-themed books.**

*absolutely not, this is a stand-in for the truth

**nope

The process is purer than you’d guess

Authors and readers love to assume some cronyism in the process, and while I can’t guarantee it’s never happened, I can say I’ve never seen it happen, and I’ve only ever heard of one instance anecdotally years ago, and that guy was publicly shamed.

A writer who has reached the level of prominence at which they’d be asked to judge a major prize has many writer friends; so being friends with a judge is not going to get anyone ahead. If 400 books are submitted, it’s likely that 75 are from people I know well, 50 are online buddies, 10 are from my press, three are from my agent, and one is that fun debut author who started the conga line at Bread Loaf. Judges scrupulously recuse themselves from reading or voting on authors about whom they don’t think they can be neutral, and they disclose personal or professional relationships. People will hand books off to other judges because the authors are former students, or close friends, or because they just can’t stand the guy. Recusals and disclosures continue up to the end.

I’ll also hand off a book because I suspect I might not be the right reader for it, but that the right judge might love it and really champion it. One such book eventually made it onto the shortlist for something I judged.

It’s also far more random than you’d guess

Because the very first round of reading often involves just one set of eyes on a book, whether a book makes it to the next round can depend entirely on the tastes of one person. One person! A person who also might not care for chocolate, or who loves ketchup on their eggs. A person who just was not up for this particular book at this particular moment. Or (see seven zillion books in six months) might not have had the luxury of putting a book down on a bad day and picking it up again in the right mood.

Conversely: It helps if the book sounds promising to a particular judge. (Literary sci-fi set in Paraguay? I was just in Paraguay! Give it here!) And yes, that “promise” could, even subconsciously, have to do with the author’s strong reputation or with a lot of praise around the book. (Some judges actively seek out book reviews to help them prioritize; others avoid them completely.) Of course, that huge reputation or excessive praise could backfire, too. And there’s a thrill to discovering someone new or overlooked. We were all new once. We’ve all felt overlooked. We’d all love to be the ones to find the best new thing.

It helps if the book came out early enough in the year that the judge might have picked it up before the judging period even began. (Although in the long run, it can help if a judge reads a book late in the process and is freshly in its thrall when the judging conversations happen.)

And then in the assessment itself, there’s a bewildering amount of randomness. Think of all the books you read in the past year, and pick your top five. Then think about it an hour later, and see if you’ve changed your mind or if you’re second-guessing yourself. Have a good nap and see how you feel about it then. What about a week from now?

I’m going to share an anonymous story from a friend who was judging a big prize several years ago: “We got on the phone to discuss our longlist. To fill one remaining spot, I consulted my reading notebook and named a book I was happy with. A day later, I realized I’d neglected to enter one of my favorites of the year into my notebook, and had forgotten it during our discussion. I might have named that work instead. But I didn’t.”

I’ve also heard about committees in which one judge didn’t pull their weight and the other judges weren’t able to pick up all the slack—meaning some submitted books barely got looked at.

You’d be amazed what isn’t submitted

Those last two details might have thrown you into panic mode, but I hope you saved some rage.

Some prizes require a submission fee, and some don’t. Some allow submissions directly from authors, and some require the submissions to come from publicists or editors. In either case, publicists and editors make decisions about which titles from their list to send in to which prizes. Even when submission is free, they want their nominations to mean something. If Random House sent in literally every one of its 2026 novels for a certain prize, it would overwhelm and probably annoy the judges.

The submission fee can be an obstacle for small presses, unfortunately. But why a major press would not submit a book from an established prize winner—a book that’s making all kinds of best-of-the-year lists—for a major prize, is absolutely beyond me. But those balls get dropped all the time.

Several years ago, I was judging a prize for which we split our initial reading by alphabet section. Let’s say I had A-G. Late in the game, a friend asked what I thought of the new Jane Doe. I texted back: “Jane Doe has a new book????” Jane Doe was a Pulitzer winner at the top of her career.

A friend was judging nonfiction for a major prize and the whole group agreed, over email, that there was a clear frontrunner, a book they’d all read and loved. Only then did they realize it hadn’t been submitted before the deadline.

Another friend judging one of the biggest fiction prizes tells me the book that won—a win that made the author’s career—was initially not submitted. One of the judges had read a great review of it, and reached out right before the deadline asking that the book be sent in. I’ve also heard of judges reaching out, asking for a book to be submitted, and the book still not being sent.

Perhaps the tedious task of filling prize entry forms gets delegated to interns. Perhaps there are gremlins in the system. But if I were an editor, I’d be breathing down the neck of whoever was responsible for submissions.

You’d also be amazed what is submitted

And then there are the times you have to ask yourself why on earth a press or an individual bothered submitting a certain title. I’m talking about, for example, book #3 in a children’s trilogy about dragons being submitted for a major adult literary prize.

When the book is wildly inappropriate to the prize (a steamy, formula bodice ripper sent in for the Booker), there are three possibilities I can think of: 1) The press is obligated to send the book in for all major prizes because the author, who sells a lot of books, got it in their contract. 2) An author sent it in not having researched what the prize is, the past winners, etc. or just having great confidence that THIS educational comic book about Christian frogs is going to win over all those cold, hard literary hearts. 3) The author knows damn well that this isn’t going to work, but wants to say the book “was nominated for the Pulitzer” in the hopes that people think this means it was a finalist. (This happens often enough that the Pulitzer website now states, “We discourage someone saying he or she was “nominated” for a Pulitzer simply because an entry was sent to us.”)

Panels aren’t gunning for forced diversity

Every couple of years, someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about complains publicly that judging panels are picking books based on wokeness or diversity quotas or some other nonsense.

Every panel I’ve been part of has paused for a second after we’ve chosen our list for a little after-the-fact audit, checking that unconscious biases didn’t make us notably uneven on things like gender balance, ethnicity, genre (Did we pick ten novels and no short story collections? Are we cool with that?), press size, and even topic. And not once have we ever needed to make an adjustment.

It’s true that longlists don’t look like they used to. This might have to do with prize committees themselves finally diversifying, which means a broader variety of opinions and tastes. And it might have to do with all of us preferring books that, you know, do not sound like every other book we’ve read.

It turns out that when we read broadly and fairly, it’s no longer true that 95% of prizes go to straight white men, go figure.

The Pulitzers are different

It’s worth noting that the Pulitzers have an unusual setup. For each category, a jury of five authors and critics nominates three finalists, and then sends them on to the Pulitzer Board at Columbia University—a board composed largely of journalists, with one resident poet, one novelist, etc. People tend to serve on this board for multiple years. The Pulitzer Board meets for two days on campus at Columbia, after having read all finalists, to make the final decisions on everything from fiction to photojournalism to regional news coverage.

Then there’s this, from the Pulitzer website (bolding is mine): “Awards are made by majority vote, but the Board is also empowered to vote ‘no award,’ or by three-fourths vote to select an entry that has not been nominated or to switch nominations among the categories. If the Board is dissatisfied with the nominations of any jury, it can ask the Administrator to consult with the chair to ascertain if there are other worthy entries. Meanwhile, the deliberations continue.” Among other things, this means the jury needs to have a secret fourth choice lying in wait. And it’s a fourth choice that will likely never be revealed. And it means that as a jurist, you don’t actually know if they’ll pick one of your books or go with something completely different. It also means that when you see three finalists plus a winner announced (rather than two finalists plus a winner) something interesting has happened.

Another difference: For most prizes, the identity of the judges is public. The Pulitzer jury for each category must remain secret until the prizes are announced. Many awards are announced and bestowed at a black tie event. The Pulitzers are announced in a livestream online, and then awarded at a lunch in a library on the Columbia campus. Finalists (I was a finalist in 2019) don’t get to attend, but are sent a nifty snail mail letter that’s framable.

Our reading as a jury ended in December, when we sent in our three finalists. We didn’t know the winner until the moment it was announced publicly last month. (Fortunately, I loved all three finalists equally, so I had the fun of sitting at my laptop with the StoryStudio staff, to whom I’d revealed my judging about five minutes earlier, waiting to whoop for joy regardless of the outcome. Indeed I whoopt.)

If you’re ever a finalist at a live ceremony, here’s what to do

That Pulitzer livestream is lovely, but it’s extremely fun to dress up and go to some ballroom where everything is announced live and you can pretend people care about this as much as the Oscars.

If you are ever in the position of needing to dress up for a live awards ceremony where the winner will be announced and suddenly have to take the stage and say something, you need to do two things. 1) Actually write out a speech and practice it, even if you think you have no chance, and no, it’s not bad luck, what’s bad luck is getting up there and saying something you’ll regret. 2) Make separate afterparty plans with friends, in the likely event that you don’t win. Meaning: Get out of there pretty fast, go to the restaurant where you have reservations, and relax with people who love you. Because if you stay at the party, you’ll have people coming up to you all night with tragic pity on their faces, saying, “I am so sorry you didn’t win.” And you might have been feeling great, happy for the winner, so thrilled to have been a finalist, but these people are going to bum you out. Get out of there.”

There is more on Rebercca Makkai’s substack if you’re interested: https://rebeccamakkai.substack.com/p/book-prizes-dont-work-how-you-think

Novels vs Scripts

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Leslie Liautaud has an article on the Writer’s Digest website, undated, in which she points out the differences between novel-writing and script-writing.

Leslie Liautaud is an award-winning playwright and novelist and has been active in the performing arts for over 30 years. As a writer, Leslie has had several of her original full-length stage plays produced throughout the Midwest, including the multi-award winning immersive production, Southern Gothic. Leslie is the author of the coming-of-age novel, Black Bear Lake, which placed first in the Chanticleer International Book Award’s Somerset Contemporary and Literary Fiction division. Her psychological thriller, Butterfly Pinned, will be released on May 10th, 2025.

Leslie Liautaud

Leslei says,”The first time I stepped on stage, I was five years old. I might forget my anniversary or what I had for breakfast, but I will never forget the feeling the first time I performed in front of an audience. My role was “Little Girl” in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN. I remember that I had to wait for the lead actor to say, “Get out of here, little girl!” three times before running off stage. I remember being extremely nervous I would lose track of the prompts. I remember my eyes darting out to the audience and finding a sea of strange faces. But mostly, I remember being elated. Suffice it to say, I was hooked. From that performance on, I worked as an actor on stage and TV for the following 20 years.

I hadn’t ever considered becoming a playwright until my early 30s when, at a dinner party, a man recounted the love story behind the Taj Mahal. Immediately, I thought, “Why isn’t this a movie? Or a television series??” It was at that dinner I decided to write a script about Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal. I poured over history books and articles and bled the epic love story onto page after page. When I finished, I held the script delicately in my hands like a newborn baby. It embodied a fresh creative energy that I hadn’t felt in years. Make no mistake, I had written what is quite possibly the worst script ever written in the history of writing. But I had done it! I had written a script. It was abundantly clear I knew nothing about the technicalities of writing a screenplay. However, I knew stage plays—the formatting, the structure, the heartbeat—like the back of my hand.

Time went on and after 15 years of writing for the stage and after the production of several full-length dramas, I decided to challenge myself by writing a novel. Much like screenplays, I was starting at ground zero. But I wasn’t worried, as I was an avid reader. I figured, “I’ll just write the story, expanding on my knowledge of dialogue, add some descriptors, and voila!” But voila, it did not. I found myself in the same predicament of inexperience I had been in with attempting to write a screenplay. While some of the practices and techniques I had honed as a playwright were valuable, there was much to learn.

As creative and curious artists, we are constantly experimenting with new techniques and approaches which keeps art in a constant state of flux. That said, after an ongoing career as a playwright and with my second novel, Butterfly Pinned, set for May publication, I can state with all certainty that there remain distinct and stark differences between writing a novel and writing a play.

Format

Formatting is the most obvious of the differences, but it is the foundation. A novel gives you free reign in chapter length and, in most cases, the only parameter you should abide to is writing in paragraph form. Plays, however, must be formatted into a preexisting, specific script form. There’s no getting around it.

Consider your script as an operating manual for the actors, director, set designer, etc. It needs to be cohesive, so all parties remain on the same page. (Pun intended!) The easiest way to achieve this is by using software designed to format for you, guiding you through dialogue, stage directions, and scene changes.

There are several reliable companies who offer formatting software specifically for playwrights, and which one is best for you comes down to personal taste. Some popular companies include Celtx, WriterDuet, and Trelby. My personal preference is Final Draft, which I’ve been using for over 20 years.

Setting

Again, the novel lends itself to more freedom when dealing with the setting of your story. It can include car crashes, explosions, and may span the globe. With a novel you can take your time describing the details of an expanse of land or the rich history of an ancient city. With a play, what you can convey beyond dialogue is minimal.

The main restriction is physical space. You must contain the setting to a stage. Unless the play is a big budget Broadway extravaganza, pyrotechnics, multiple scenery changes, and ornate sets are unrealistic. Rule of thumb is minimal is best. Most often, a stage production will have a hired set designer, so your sole job is to convey the setting you desire through the dialogue and stage directions.

Content

A novel offers you a wonderful opportunity to tell a multi-layered, in depth look at the world through the lens of one character, many characters, or as an observer. A reader can hear inner monologues and passing thoughts of the characters. A novel allows narration to guide a reader through the story, gently pushing and pulling whichever direction you, the writer, intends.

A play relies solely on dialogue and action to convey the story. Every spoken word must count, and unspoken words carry as much weight. I like to think of plays as deep dives into human psychology. Where a novel can be either plot or character driven, a play is, with few exceptions, character driven.

And your character driven story must be succinct. While a novel has the breadth of 400 pages to express the Hero’s Journey, the psychological voyage in a play must take place in approximately 80 pages. Every line of dialogue and every stage direction must directly correlate to a particular character’s conscious or unconscious motives.

End Result

Whether you finish writing your novel or writing your play, please give yourself a pat on the back. It’s a huge accomplishment!

Naturally, your next step is to share your work of art with friends, family, or the world at large. This, too, differs when speaking of novels vs. plays. In the ever-changing landscape of publishing, there are now several outlets to share your book. Self-publishing is a wonderful option for those who are interested in a small batch of copies or for those brave enough to handle the entire process of selling books themselves. Hybrid publishing is another route for those who still would like to maintain control of the book itself but would like help in the physical publishing and distribution. And for those with perseverance, after obtaining an agent, traditional publishing is an option.

For plays, publishing is possible, but it is not the end game. Production is the goal. As with novels, there are many roads to production. I began my career by lending a script to a local community theatre. They did not have to pay a royalty fee, and I was granted live productions to gauge what worked and what didn’t in my writing. It was a win-win for all. Playwrights can submit to local and regional theaters. You may even put sheets up in the backyard, or apartment basement, corral some willing friends, and stage your own low budget (free!) production.

Whether you choose to write a novel or write a play, I wish you joy in telling your story!

Plagarism: HowBig a Problem?

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There is an article on this subject by Joseph Epstein in the July/August of Commentary magazine.

Joseph Epstein has written for Commentary for more than 60 years. His most recent book is Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life (Simon & Schuster).

Joseph Epstein

Mr Epstein says,”After writing for publication for nearly 70 years, I ask myself: Have I ever committed the sin of plagiarism? I hope I haven’t, but I shouldn’t be entirely shocked to learn that somewhere along the way I have. Writers much better known than I have been accused of plagiarism. Among them have been Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Benjamin Franklin. Vladimir Nabokov admitted to “unconscious plagiarism,” as did Helen Keller, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Beatle George Harrison.

No surprise to learn that the greatest amount of plagiarism occurs in schools, in high schools but chiefly in colleges and universities. I’m pleased to report that over 30 years of university teaching I never caught a student plagiarizing in any of my courses. Was I, though, insufficiently on guard? Should I have been more suspicious of that young woman who sat in the back of the classroom scarcely saying a word all quarter long and yet wrote a quite brilliant paper on Joseph Conrad? Or of the young man who, when he did speak generally revealed his ignorance, then wrote a quite good paper on Portrait of a Lady? 

I have been told by colleagues that catching a student in plagiarism can be a complicated experience. Suddenly the student’s fate, at least his or her fate as a student, is in your hands, for to report a student for plagiarism could mean expulsion from the university. 

I was, of course, aware of plagiarism but failed to comprehend the extent of the phenomenon. Roger Kreuz, author of Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, a recent book on the subject, claims to have found so much of it in researching his book that, as he writes, “I must confess that this odyssey has dented my faith in human nature.”

Kreuz, a professor of psychology and dean at the University of Memphis, in scanning the broad fields of plagiarism, reports that he hoped to provide “an exploration of plagiarism’s psychological and cultural aspects [that] can help us make sense of what it is and why it happens so often.” Kreuz’s index, extending from Shakespeare to Martin Luther King Jr., from Martial to Joe Biden, from Jesus (Jesus, for Chrissake!) to H.G. Wells, reads like the table of contents of Who’s Who. The claim against Jesus as a plagiarist was made by a second-century Greek philosopher named Celsus, who argued that Jesus plagiarized Plato. Others, meanwhile, have claimed that Plato himself plagiarized from earlier philosophers. 

In his preface, Kreuz notes, “I’m still surprised by who has engaged in this practice. Yes, this group includes plenty of hacks and students. But they are also joined by the highest elected officials of several countries, as well as Nobel and Pulitzer Prize recipients, bestselling authors and artists, and distinguished faculty at elite universities.” The book’s epigraph is “Plagiarism: it’s not just for mediocrities anymore.”

Plagiarism is the appropriation of the words of another without acknowledgement. While it may be a sin, it is not a crime, though infringement of copyright rights, which constitute real property, can be criminal. How many words are appropriated is crucial in determining true plagiarism. Kreuz quotes the poet Sheenagh Pugh on the point that those who plagiarize generally do not do so only once but are, in effect, repeat offenders. He adds that “the internet has made plagiarism far easier to commit, but it has also made it much easier to recognize.”

Along with standard plagiarism, in which a writer copies another person’s words without acknowledgment and claims them for his own, there is unconscious plagiarism, subconscious plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and what Kreuz calls “Teflon plagiarism,” the last being plagiarism that doesn’t seem in the least to hurt the reputation of the perpetrator. Kreuz’s prime example here is Ronald Reagan. 

Unconscious plagiarism entails committing plagiarism without being aware one is doing so. Mark Twain, Helen Keller, and Vladimir Nabokov serve as notable examples of unconscious plagiarism. In the case of Nabokov, Kreuz adduces a story with the same subject as Lolita, an older man transfixed by a female child, that Nabokov read when a young man in Berlin. He discovers another story the Russian had to have read, this one with the actual title “Lolita,” and still other stories by Salvador Dalí that likely unconsciously influenced the writing of Lolita. Finally, at his death, Nabokov left behind an unfinished novel, translated, edited, and published by his son Dimitri, also about a middle-aged man and a nymphet, which shows among other things Vladimir Nabokov’s obsession with the subject. 

Self-plagiarism exists as well, though it’s an odd charge, since how can one steal from oneself? Kreuz’s first example of it is that of the student who uses the same academic paper for two different courses. Perhaps the most notorious instance of self-plagiarism, noted by Richard Posner in his The Little Book of Plagiarism, was that committed by Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy,who is said to have sent the same love letters to his wife and his mistress. I offer another example—myself. A few months ago, I sent an opinion piece to the Wall Street Journal, only to be told that it was remarkably similar to a piece of mine they had printed seven years earlier—a case, you might say, of self-plagiarism and unconscious plagiarism combined. The greatest self-plagiarizer, surely, is Donald J. Trump, who seems never to tire of giving the same speech, a speech that might carry the title “America Has Never Been Greater Than Under My Presidency, and It Figures Only to Get Better Yet.” 

Still, unlike other forms of plagiarism, self-plagiarism remains for the most part plagiarism without a victim. Self-plagiarism may kick in especially in old age, one of the less pleasant of whose attributes is the slippage if not serious loss of memory. (I have myself in the past month struggled to recall the name of a high school classmate, the actress Celeste Holm, and the Nixon plumber G. Gordon Liddy.)

Punishments for plagiarism differ in different realms. For scholars, they can be serious. In The Little Book of Plagiarism, Posner cites the case of Julius Kirshner, the University of Chicago historian, who published under his own name a book review written by one of his graduate students and was penalized by the university by not being permitted to teach graduate students for the next five years. 

For politicians, plagiarism tends to be viewed as less serious. Since most politicians use speechwriters, it isn’t always clear that the responsibility for their plagiarisms, when they are discovered, is truly theirs. In any case, for politicians, plagiarism doesn’t compare in seriousness, as Kreuz points out, with philandering or financial finagling. Yet, as he also notes, the accusation can be used against politicians by their enemies. Here he cites Senator Rand Paul, in a campaign speech in support of the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, comparing pro-choice advocates to eugenicists in the very same language written in a Wikipedia entry on the subject—a plagiarism happily pointed out by Rachel Maddow. 

Joe Biden was found guilty of plagiarism on more than one occasion, once in law school for copying a paper written by someone else and at other times in his campaign speeches. None of this, though widely known, prevented Barack Obama from choosing him as his vice president or kept Biden himself from becoming our 46th president. For those of us who prefer our heroes pure, the discovery of their plagiarisms, as is the case of Martin Luther King Jr.’s on his doctoral dissertation, comes as sad news. 

Another large realm for plagiarism is the commencement speech. Perhaps this is because there is not all that much beyond clichés that can be said on these occasions. Just now, the great subject for commencement speeches is artificial intelligence, but it, too, will doubtless soon be worn out and devolve into elevated platitudes. I have myself given only one commencement address and am unlikely ever to be called upon to give another, for my presence is sure to arouse the ire of the wokesters and bring out protesters. I have also written in mockery of the honorary degree, part of every college commencement ceremony, which is certain to keep me home during the months of May and June, where I am happy to be.

_____________

While plagiarism is not a crime, for those caught at it, it is a disgrace. As Posner writes, “The stigma of plagiarism seems never to fade completely, not because it is an especially heinous offense but because it is embarrassingly second-rate; its practitioners are pathetic, almost ridiculous.”

The disgrace is easily enough avoided by attributing to its true, or original, author the words appropriated, either through quotation marks or, if the material has been paraphrased, through footnotes or endnotes. Merely changing the words slightly through the use of synonyms—known as Rogetting, after the compiler of the famous Thesaurus—won’t do and can bring on its own complications. Like nearly everyone else, I on occasion turn to Google and Wikipedia to check birth and death dates and other facts used in my own writing. In doing so, I generally attempt to change the wording of material I use. Whether this Rogetting frees me from the charge of plagiarism, I am less than certain, though I hope it does. 

Not all plagiarism is literary. Music can be plagiarized and so can painting. Martha Stewart was accused of plagiarizing recipes for her famous cookbook. Of his nearly 18,000 Peanuts cartoons, Charles Schulz, Kreuz reports, was caught out self-plagiarizing one. Some classical music is said to contain “quotations” from other musicians, but since musical notes do not allow for attributions, why this is not a form of plagiarism is less than clear. When one thinks of the scores of paintings of Mary and Jesus, mother and child, one wonders why all but the first are not acts of plagiarism. 

Then there is inadvertent plagiarism, where one forgets that one had read something elsewhere and that what one writes is one’s own. “A bookkeeping mistake made by one’s mental accountant,” Kreuz calls it. “This can result in a genuine belief that an idea, a phrase, or a melody is the product of one’s own mind instead of someone else’s.” 

Perhaps most complicated of all is the plagiarizing of ideas. On some rare occasions two people—one thinks here of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution—will come upon the same or a highly similar idea at roughly the same time. Others are only too pleased to take up the ideas of someone else and claim them as their own.

Some plagiarisms constitute creative improvement. Both Kreuz and Posner cite Shakespeare here. After quoting from the descriptions of Cleopatra on her barge from both Plutarch and Shakespeare, who appropriated it from Plutarch, Posner notes that “if this is plagiarism, we need more plagiarism.” He prefers to call it “creative imitation.” In this category he adds portions of Tristram Shandy and, closer to our day, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Eliot it was, in his The Sacred Wood, who wrote that “immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” 

As “unrepentant plagiarists,” Roger Kreuz cites Susan Sontag and Bob Dylan. Both, in their different ways, claimed that such appropriations of the words of others—Sontag in her fourth novel, In America, Dylan in his various songs—made possible,à laShakespeare on Plutarch, improvements upon the originals. Dylan’s response to his accusers was “All those evil m——f——s can rot in hell.” Ms. Sontag, more measured (it would be hard not to be), held that on this matter of appropriating other works for one’s own, “there’s a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions.” She has a point. As style is the man (or woman), as Buffon had it, so for the literary, reading is coterminous with actual experience. 

Posner notes, rightly, that creativity is not the same as originality. One can be the former without being the latter. Looking back upon my own decades of writings, I find little original in them. I believe I have acquired a style, or “voice,” as it is often called in academic writing programs. I choose my own words, I deploy them in sentences of my own fashioning, I have my own point of view. But I have set out no new ideas. Many of the ideas I have acquired derive from my reading of those essayists I admire, among them Michel de Montaigne, Matthew Arnold, Max Beerbohm, George Orwell, Michael Oakeshott. I hope that their influence, if not of course their words, turns up in my own essays. Does the influence of other writers, writers better than oneself, constitute yet another form of plagiarism? If so, then perhaps almost all writing is essentially plagiarism. In which case, I say, don’t evade your eyes, just plagiarize. As Tom Lehrer put it.

Bookstore Boom vs Literary Decline

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There is an intriguing article on the Literary Hub website by Ellen O’Connell Whittet, dated 16 June 2026 in which she explores the above contradiction.

Ellen O’Connell Whittet is  an essayist and continuing lecturer who teaches in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her debut novel, Book of Hours (Dzanc), is forthcoming in 2026. Her memoir, What You Become in Flight (Melville House, 2020) was named a most-anticipated book by Refinery 29 and Chicago Review. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She co-hosts the podcast Good Moms on Paper with writers Annie Hartnett and Tessa Fontaine.

Ellen O’Connell Whittet

She says, “I was standing in line at Chaucer’s Books, my local indie, when it occurred to me that the line was longer than usual. This has been happening regularly enough that I’ve stopped being surprised—Chaucer’s business is downright defiant. But just that afternoon I had read something about declining literacy rates, and the cognitive dissonance was hard to shake. I mentioned to the woman at the register that I was glad to see the place so full. “I keep waiting to read the worst news ever in the local paper,” I said, meaning the store’s closure.

She didn’t hesitate. “Not gonna happen,” she said twice, shaking her head.

I wanted to believe her. I still do. But I’ve been turning that contrast over ever since.

Here are the two facts, sitting in apparent contradiction. Reading scores for American high school seniors recently fell to their lowest point since the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) first administered the assessment in 1992. Only 35 percent of seniors tested as proficient in reading. Nearly a third scored below basic—meaning they couldn’t reliably locate details in a text to understand its meaning. The decline precedes the pandemic and is steepest among students who were already struggling. Meanwhile, the American Booksellers Association reports that the number of independent bookstores in the United States has grown by 70% since 2020, from roughly 1,900 to more than 3,200. In 2025 alone, 422 new independently owned stores opened nationwide. Barnes & Noble opened more than 50 new locations in 2024 and has plans for 60 more. The line at Chaucer’s, it turns out, is part of a national phenomenon.

One version of the story is about access and class. The bookstore boom is a story about a certain educated, culturally aspirational demographic doing what it has always done, while the literacy crisis unfolds elsewhere, namely in under-resourced schools, rural communities, and households without the discretionary income to browse a charming bookshop on a Saturday afternoon. Jen Lemberger, co-owner of Chaucer’s, makes this point plainly. “Books are a luxury item for many,” she told me. She noted that the bookstore resurgence also reflects demographics—millennials and Gen Z, the highest users of libraries, are now at ages where they have the means and motivation to open small businesses and spend on books. Nicole Vasquez, who works at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, corroborates the geographic dimension. “Those living in rural parts of the country who don’t have access to bookstores or libraries have lower literacy rates,” she told me. “I would say that is a lot of America—more than people think.”

The numbers bear this out. According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, 88% of college graduates say they’ve read a book in the past year, compared to 60% of those with a high school education or less.

But there’s something else happening too that complicates both the optimistic and the pessimistic readings. Miranda Sanchez, owner of Epilogue Books in Chapel Hill, notes that the boom is heavily concentrated in niche stores—forty-three romance-specialty shops opened last year alone—and in bookstores that function primarily as third spaces, places to be seen and to belong. The nature of what’s selling has shifted too. Sprayed-edge limited editions bought and re-bought for the shelf, not necessarily to read; BookTok-fueled titles that sell out for months on the strength of a viral video.

The boom, Sanchez says, is “often centered around a book as a product, not as literature.” Books carry a cultural prestige that television has never had, according to Sanchez, a cachet that makes them a powerful vehicle for identity-making. It’s why influencers and actors want to become authors even after they’ve already achieved fame. When the aesthetic of literary life becomes the point, something about the relationship between books and the expansion of one’s inner life shifts. The bookstore stays full. The tote bags are beautiful. And it becomes harder to notice what’s changed.

Sarah Arnold, at Parnassus Books in Nashville, offers what I find to be the most humanly persuasive explanation for why people are flooding into bookstores even as reading scores fall: loneliness. “Technology and social media promised to bring us together,” she told me, “but more often it feels like they siphon each of us into a solitary lifestyle, and it’s hurting us.” Bookstores are filling a social void. People can come to Parnassus on almost any given night for an author event or a book club meeting, or simply browse and strike up a conversation. This helps explain how the bookstore boom and the literacy crisis can coexist.

People are coming for community and the experience of being around people who care about the same things they care about. The act of reading, which is slow, solitary, and at times, demanding, is a related but separate transaction. And yet, for all the talk of bookstores as gathering places, only 7% of American adults participated in a book club in the past year, suggesting that what people are seeking may be the feeling of literary community more than its sustained practice.

Mike Gustafson, co-owner of Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, frames the phenomenon in explicitly political terms. Gustafson believes people are “desperately trying to support environments of books and literacy” while watching the infrastructure of public reading get dismantled. He’s not wrong. School librarians are being pressured or removed. Library budgets are first to be cut  when municipalities face deficits. California’s adult literacy programs, Lemberger notes, are not guaranteed line items in the state budget. In this reading, people flooding into bookstores may represent something more than lifestyle preference—a kind of cultural self-defense, a community’s attempt to preserve the infrastructure of reading at the precise moment that infrastructure is being defunded elsewhere. The bookstore boom and the literacy crisis may not be the contradictions I originally thought they were, but symptoms of the same underlying pressure.

The optimistic version of this story is that bookstores can do some of the work that schools and libraries are being prevented from doing. Arnold talks about adults who started reading during the pandemic and found, in places like Parnassus, a community that extended and deepened that habit. Vasquez credits TikTok with giving Gen Z a genuine entry point into reading culture. If a twenty-two-year-old comes in for a romantasy and leaves with a staff recommendation that surprises her, that is the system working.

But the less optimistic version is harder to dismiss. If a third of American high school seniors cannot reliably comprehend what they read, then the customers filling bookstores on a Saturday afternoon are largely not the people at risk, and the beautiful new bookstore opening in a walkable urban neighborhood is not reaching the communities where the crisis is worst.

I still believe the line at my local indie represents the desire for community and the experience of being somewhere that takes the written word seriously. Lemberger, for her part, is cautiously hopeful but honest. According to her, “As economics change and political policies are implemented, there is definitely concern about folks adjusting their spending habits and focusing on needs such as housing, food, and health over that new book they may want. We’ll see what the landscape shows in two to three years.” The bookstore boom is happening, but it’s fragile in ways the attendance numbers don’t reveal. Meanwhile, the literacy crisis is not fragile at all. I believe the bookseller when she says Chaucer’s isn’t going anywhere. But the line at a well-stocked bookstore in a prosperous coastal city is not the same thing as a reading culture, and we should be careful not to mistake one for the other.”

Can Men Take the Female POV on Sex?

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There is an article in the Telegraph on 14 May 2026 in which Claire Allfree interviews Francis Spufford about his latest book.

Claire Allfree is an arts journalist. She writes regular book reviews for The Times and for The Telegraph.

Claire says, “Francis Spufford is in danger of choking on his ginger beer. We’re sitting on the outdoor terrace at Soho House, and I’ve asked him about the vast quantities of sex that feature in his latest novel Nonesuch. A lavishly imagined speculative history, it depicts a Blitz-eviscerated London under threat from an occult Nazi plot to assassinate Winston Churchill, and is told from the point of view of Iris, a 23-year-old female clerk with a weakness for “handsome idiots”. An older male novelist, writing enthusiastic sex scenes from the perspective of a younger woman? Quelle horreur.

“I’m very aware of the possibilities of falling into umpteen varieties of creepiness or tawdriness,” Spufford agrees. “I’m a balding 62-year-old man.” It’s a warm day, but beneath his trademark kente cap, he’s starting to blush. “I read John Updike’s [famously lusty] Couples while I was writing Nonesuch, to see if I could learn anything from it. Instead I realised why David Foster Wallace described Updike as ‘a penis with a thesaurus’. It’s not because men are inevitably doomed writing sex. It’s because of the way Updike wrote about it.”

UK author Francis Spufford
Author Francis Spufford’s latest novel Nonesuch is told from the point of view of Iris, a 23-year-old female clerk with a weakness for ‘handsome idiots’ Credit: Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph

Francis Spufford is in danger of choking on his ginger beer. We’re sitting on the outdoor terrace at Soho House, and I’ve asked him about the vast quantities of sex that feature in his latest novel Nonesuch. A lavishly imagined speculative history, it depicts a Blitz-eviscerated London under threat from an occult Nazi plot to assassinate Winston Churchill, and is told from the point of view of Iris, a 23-year-old female clerk with a weakness for “handsome idiots”. An older male novelist, writing enthusiastic sex scenes from the perspective of a younger woman? Quelle horreur.

“I’m very aware of the possibilities of falling into umpteen varieties of creepiness or tawdriness,” Spufford agrees. “I’m a balding 62-year-old man.” It’s a warm day, but beneath his trademark kente cap, he’s starting to blush. “I read John Updike’s [famously lusty] Couples while I was writing Nonesuch, to see if I could learn anything from it. Instead I realised why David Foster Wallace described Updike as ‘a penis with a thesaurus’. It’s not because men are inevitably doomed writing sex. It’s because of the way Updike wrote about it.”

“I had rules,” Spufford continues gamely. “I only wrote through Iris’s gaze. I still don’t know what Iris looks like – I do have a good idea of what her boyfriend Greg’s naked body looks like.”

Where does he stand on the argument that male writers ought not to write from the perspective of a woman at all? “I think that literature is f—ed if we can’t do a point of view that is remote from that of the author. It may go wrong, but the risk of it going horribly wrong is one of the risks that literature needs to take. We should simply work very hard when we do it.”

Spufford is known as one of Britain’s most idiosyncratic and delightfully daring writers. Where other contemporary novelists are constrained by the rigours of social realism, Spufford riffs on genre and subject with dazzling ease. He reinvigorated period fiction with his Costa-winning debut, the delectable caper Golden Hill (2016), while in his Booker-nominated Light Perpetual (2021), he played with metaphysics to restore life to five London children killed in 1944 by a V2 bomb

Nonesuch, published earlier this year, is Spufford’s first venture into fantasy. I normally struggle to accept angels in fiction, but Spufford’s phantasmagoric descriptions of a war-shattered London that’s haunted by, among others, the spirit Raphael, are intoxicating. It also features fascistic demonic orders, elusive shape-shifting monsters and time-travel mechanisms.

“I wanted to write about the Blitz,” he says, “without resorting to stereotypes. The unearthliness of fantasy brought out the unearthliness of the Blitz in ways that [complemented] the sense that an absolutely literal clash of good and evil was taking place at that historical moment.”

Spufford is a practising Christian, and is married to the Dean of Chelmsford, Jessica Martin. Having grown up an atheist, he came to the faith during his 30s, following what he had previously termed “a classic male f—-up” (the nature of which he has always refused to discuss). “My belief can’t help but be in my novels,” he says, “because something as fundamental as [faith] colours your basic understanding of what human beings are. But I feel very strongly that my books need to work for [everyone].”

On one level, Nonesuch is a critical response to CS Lewis’s allegorical Chronicles of Narnia. Iris, for instance, is a sexually confident, modern incarnation of poor Susan Pevensie, whom Lewis notoriously bars from Narnia in the final book because of her interest in “nylons and lipstick”. Spufford adores Lewis, but on this point, he demurs. “It’s hard not to think that the way Lewis denies Susan the happy ending stems from a certain bachelor misogyny. People have worked so hard to find another excuse for Lewis, but that’s kind of what it is. So I wanted to speak up for Susan.”

A few years ago, he even wrote a sequel to The Magician’s Nephew. It was, he said, “for the pleasure of my 10-year-old self, who longed for there to be one more Chronicle”. Alas, the Lewis estate has taken umbrage and the book remains unpublished, mired in legal difficulties. “I have hopes that – especially if the [2027] Greta Gerwig film adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew does well – there may yet be a chance of a rethink. And if not, the books go out of copyright in the UK in 2034.”

Spufford is also chairman of judges for the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize, which will be awarded on May 20 to an imaginative book “in which story-telling, fiction and non-fiction writing combine in an original and exciting way”. Set up last year, the prize is named in honour of the late Polish theatre director and writer, whom Spufford describes as a “Tristram Shandy-loving, Stanisław Lem-reading, pulp science fiction aficionado”. The six shortlisted books resist easy classification: they rove between imagined documentary, essayistic fiction and what Spufford calls a “fascinatingly odd” memoir of Albanian history. He adds that at least two of the entries are “nothing like anything British culture has produced in the last 30 years”.

Spufford was himself a form-busting non-fiction writer, and only turned to fiction relatively late, in his 50s. Does he think modern British non-fiction – which has suffered an alarming drop in sales in recent years – lacks daring? (Only two of the shortlisted authors, Olivia Laing and Thea Lenarduzzi, are even partly British, and three of the five books are published by small independent houses.)

“I’m too old to believe that what’s happening in publishing now says anything definitive about what publishers want or where the culture is going,” he says diplomatically. “But I don’t really believe that there is a mass of fabulous stuff out there that doesn’t make it in because of [risk-averse] gatekeepers. I think that some things are fashionable sometimes and other things are fashionable at other times, but that the good stuff always makes its way out.

“I’m also sceptical about the idea that something has to be universally celebrated,” he adds. “Maybe things only need to find their right nook and cranny to thrive in.”

What does keep Spufford up at night is AI. “It’s not just our growing attention-deficit problem. There is also, coming down the line, a major prose-production problem. You can’t become a superlative writer without having first been a crap and imitative one. You only learn how to be good after however many hours of practice. The idea that AI can mechanise the production of the mediocre, and still produce people who can do the excellent and the marvellous is an illusion – a writer has to pass through the mediocre in order to get to the marvellous.

“But why would people do that if  AI can do that for them? I’m afraid I predict that literature will be destroyed by dribbling morons in about 15 years.”

I tell him that many people fear the same. He compares AI to “the writing machines in the basement of the Ministry in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which produce an unending diet of porn, romances and adventure stories. For me, there’s hope in the fact that people like Jack Reacher novels, because nobody else has offered the idea of a huge, burly, ultra-violent protector in the way Lee Child has”.”

Publishers vs AI

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The Guardian reported on May 6 that major publishers were suing Meta for copyright.

The article said, “Five major publishers sued Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant misused their books and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence models.

Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill, as well as author Scott Turow, alleged in the proposed class-action complaint that Meta pirated millions of their works and used them without permission to train its Llama large language models to respond to human prompts.

“Meta’s mass-scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination,” Maria Pallante, the president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.

Meta has denied any wrongdoing.

“AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesperson responded in a statement on Tuesday. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.“

The publishers allege that Meta pirated works ranging from textbooks to scientific articles to novels including The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown for its AI training. They asked the court for permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and an unspecified amount of monetary damages.

The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and tech companies over AI training, in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for infringement. All of the pending cases are likely to revolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative content. The first two judges to consider the matter issued diverging rulings last year. Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle one of the cases, agreeing last year to pay a group of authors $1.5bn to resolve a class-action lawsuit that could have cost the company billions more in damages for alleged piracy. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement as well.”

Writers, leave AI alone!

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There is an article in yesterday’s Telegraph by Cal Revely-Calder with a title similar to the above, which, for once, puts the shoe on the other foot. Instead of complaining about AI invading the creative space, it objects to those who admit AI to the literary space.

Cal Revely-Calder is the literary editor of the Telegraph.

He said, “Self-respect, Joan Didion once wrote, cannot be faked. It depends on “a sense of one’s intrinsic worth”. You can pretend or lie or dissemble if you want to boost your reputation, but in the end you’ll always lack “what was once called character”.

This thought occurs to me whenever – and these days it’s pretty often – I see someone in the literary world stand accused of secretly using AI. Recently, for those alleged sins, the novelist Mia Ballard has had her second book pulled from shelves; the politician Matt Goodwin has had his state-of-Britain polemic castigated; and the critic Alex Preston has had a book review near-disowned by the New York Times.

Alex Preston

All three have confessed to some degree of AI use and, to me, none of the confessions are good enough. Ballard blamed a human editor she had hired to revise her novel, though you might expect a novelist to check her own final draft. Preston blamed himself, claiming he had been struggling to meet the NYT’s demand – a modest 1,000 words – and, in desperation, had resorted to help from AI, which plagiarised a piece in the Guardian. Again, Preston seems not to have checked.

Goodwin has been more defensive. Confronted by critics who claimed that his new book, Suicide of a Nation, was full of ersatz quotations, dubious claims and incorrect facts, he retorted that the detractors were partly wrong and partly missing the point. After all, his core thesis – that migration is destroying Britain  – was untouched; some “errors and typos” were inevitable if you self-published to avoid the “woke” publishing industry; and his opponents were “Lefties and losers” anyway. Goodwin insists that he was working from notes and did not use AI to write one word, merely (as he wrote in the Spectator) “to interrogate data”.

Matt Goodwin, academic-turned-politician, has admitted using AI ‘to interrogate data’ for his new book Suicide of a Nation Credit: Paul Cooper

But even if we believe him, and charge only Preston and Ballard with subcontracting their work to AI, something in the culture is clearly amiss. To use an AI tool may be wise if your job involves crunching data sets or summoning figures – though you would be advised to check the robot’s homework – and it is probably true that, in such empirical areas, its use will become society’s norm. To use such a tool if your job is to write, whether creatively or critically, misunderstands your brief. Writing is thinking. They are inseparable processes. Circumvent them and you may as well not have bothered. Readers are human beings, and they want human thoughts and feelings to be expressed.

This applies, to be clear, to non-fiction as well as fiction. Short of being a pure list of dates or statistics, any book of any genre requires a guiding intelligence. Writing and reading are parallel ways of touching another mind, another soul. That is what you, the reader, are doing now. People can use AI for computation or research, but if they use AI to write one per cent of their work, as Ballard and Preston certainly did – and, again, Matt Goodwin strongly denies it – they have abrogated one per cent of the essence that makes them a human being. Morality confers on us basic obligations; one of those is treating humans, ourselves and others, as creatures worthy of dignity. To filter yourself through a robot that cannot “know” anything, that just blends other people’s books into an oracular mulch – the plagiarism device on your phone – is to insult everyone involved.

You may think this sounds moralistic. Well, good. Publishing, like fast food or arms manufacturing, is an industry, and it will function amorally, by supply and demand unless someone takes the trouble to care and shape what it does. Hence we need people – editors, booksellers and, yes, writers – to preserve, for no reason greater than feeling and taste, the human element.

Without that preservation – and corners of Amazon already look this way – AI-created writing will extract and remix the real thing, then remix itself, in an ouroboros of slop. We will be drawing on data, past tense, to generate the future, and that way stagnation lies. Genres will calcify; mistakes will multiply. And the tide is rising. Talk to anyone behind the scenes, from agents to publishers, and you will hear that AI-written submissions are pouring onto their desks. The literary agency Curtis Brown complained last week that harried agents were, in turn, feeding submissions into ChatGPT to give them summaries, without the writer’s consent.

But that is the cost of convenience, the ruling lifestyle of our age. Why do anything difficult, complex or slow when you can get a machine to do it on your behalf? If this question seems genuine to you, and you are a writer, please stop. Do literally anything else. Because good writing is extremely difficult. Ask any novelist or critic worth their salt. It involves introspection and false starts and revisions, and interventions from editors, at least if you want to do it well; and the final product will comprise, however half-remembered and half-buried, every single one of those things, alchemically changed into something new – something, you hope, now worth the attention of someone else.

Preston, at least, seems repentant, though it is a mystery to me why anyone would cheat on a book review. Such pieces cannot be written en sufficient masse to earn you a living, no matter how much AI you use, and I say that as one of the few people left commissioning them. Ballard, for her part, has gone prudently silent. Goodwin has kept raging online; you can form your own judgment of him.

In the meantime, these writers’ varying fates, as with those who come next – and there will be more – should stand as a warning to the literary world. If writing is just a product to you, just the sum total of stuff you add together to form other stuff, then it might as well be done by AI, for what difference does it make? Writing becomes mere information, data, flat and lifeless, smoothly and efficiently recombined. But if it is more than that, as I hope for most people remains the case, keep it out of your books. Have some self-respect.”

I agree!