Publishing

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.

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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!

Paperback vs Hardcover: Which Is Best?

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Maris Kreizman digs into which is best for Reader and Writer on Literary Hub dated 20 March 2026.

Maris Kreizman hosted the literary podcast, The Maris Review, for four years. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Republic, and more. Her essay collection, I Want to Burn This Place Down, is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins.

Maris Kreizman

Maris says, “If you conducted a survey, I am fairly certain you’d find that the majority of readers prefer paperbacks to hardcover books. I have no stats to back this up, but I know what I’ve heard anecdotally for years. Paperbacks are lighter and smaller and more lithe, easier to put in a pocket or a backpack and carry around. They’re also significantly cheaper. Now that the kind of mass market paperback you could find in any local grocery or drugstore have officially been retired, you’d think that the mighty trade paperback would rule the world (of books, at least).

But it’s not that simple. When my publisher originally planned for my debut essay collection to be a trade paperback original, I begged and begged them to change their minds. I had written a humorous collection, which is the genre of book that is ground zero for the TPO format, but I also wanted the essays to be seen as literary. But I know from having covered books for decades that a hardcover release signals, at least to me, that the publisher is more invested in the title.

I knew that having a hardcover release would mean more reviewers would take my book more seriously. I wasn’t planning on being a megabestseller, but I did want to make sure I got as much review coverage as possible. And, of course, the price of hardcovers is higher, which means there’s more profit, especially because the royalty split for authors is 10-15 percent for hardcover and only 7.5-10 percent for paperback.

Recently Barnes & Noble has tried to convince more publishers to publish paperback originals, particularly for YA and middle grade books. But choosing a format to please one vendor, no matter the size of that vendor, is limiting, especially when smaller indie bookstores run on such tight margins in the first place.

This is not to say that all trade paperbacks are unserious or undeserving of coverage. Paperback imprints like Vintage and Picador, as well as a great number of indie press imprints, are putting out new and impressive originals regularly. In fact in the 1980’s some of the greatest works in literature were put out as TPOs. This, of course, was before Amazon devalued the price of hardcovers so that readers expected to get brand new hardcovers at trade paper prices. I would love to read a good piece about what has happened to the viability of trade paperbacks between then and now.

I love when I see a trade paperback reprint find another life in its new format. Maybe the publisher changes the jacket design to emphasize themes that resonated with readers, or maybe there are new review blurbs that make the book design pop. At best, the trade paper reprint gives both the author and publisher a second chance at success.

My essay collection was published last July, so this coming July will see the paperback edition. I know just how lucky I am to get to be published in both formats: often, if a book isn’t a big seller in hardcover, the publisher won’t bother with a paperback at all. I hope that readers who don’t buy new hardcovers (who I don’t blame one bit) might find their way to it now. I hope the slimmer, cheaper version of my book will take a whole different journey in its new format even if we’re sticking with the old cover design, which was already totally perfect. But I also worry.

For about a year in the pre-Covid times, I reviewed five or six new-in-paperback books a month for Vulture/New York Magazine. Again, I don’t have any stats, but I’m fairly certain that approximately four or five people read those columns in total, and they were all publicists. I didn’t realize how good I had it then.

The idea of books slipping through the cracks and remaining undiscovered keeps me up at night. Currently there is not nearly enough coverage even for new hardcovers, let alone trade paper reprints. I currently don’t cover reprints because I already feel weirdly responsible for covering as many new books as I possibly can (alas, I am only one person so I am constantly feeling inadequate). I am constantly trying to stay up to date with new releases and publishers keep on putting out more. This would be a very good problem if there were more people covering books overall.

And yet, my favorite table at a bookstore will always be the new paperback table. It’s the ultimate place of discovery. In an ideal world, the trade paperback is the format for longevity, the kind of book that is perennially in stock and available at your favorite local indie so that new readers can find it again and again.”

Writing: How a Passion Can Drive Inspiration

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There is an interview in Writer’s Digest of author Rae Meadows about how her love of gymnastics shaped one of her novels.

Rae Meadows is the author of four previous novels, including I Will Send Rain. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, the Hackney Literary Award for the novel, and the Utah Book Award. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, as well as Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology, Contexts, and online.

She grew up admiring the Soviet gymnasts of the 1970s, and in her 40s decided to go back to the thing she loved as a child. She now trains regularly in adult gymnastics. She lives with her family in Brooklyn. 

Rae Meadows

Elevator pitch for the book: In 1970, in an Arctic town on the far edge of the Soviet Union, a young mother disappears leaving a mystery that haunts her husband and daughter, Anya, a gymnast in the grueling state system. From the wild tundra of Norilsk to the golden age of Soviet gymnastics to gritty late-90s Brooklyn, Winterland is the story of a woman—and an era—shaped by glory and loss.

What prompted you to write this book?

If I could point to one thing that set the novel in motion for me, it was reading about Elena Mukhina, the Soviet gymnast who won all-around gold at the 1978 World Championships. She broke her neck two years later, just before the Olympics, performing a skill on the floor she was not prepared for, which left her a quadriplegic.

Her injury was then covered up by the Soviets. There is a character in the book based on Mukhina, and she plays a pivotal role in Anya’s life.

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

It took about four years from idea to publication, with COVID mucking up the process. When I first began the novel, there was going to be a peripheral character who was a former gymnast. But I loved researching so much—my life orbits around gymnastics as a mom, a fan, and a passionate adult gymnast—gymnastics soon took over.

I could spend hours watching videos of Soviet gymnasts and call it research. I wrote much of the book in the parent area of the gym where my daughter trains.

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

It’s hard for me to believe this is my fifth novel. I feel so fortunate. Each publishing experience has been different, but this one has been by far the best.

I had the absolute lottery win of having Amy Einhorn as an editor, and I felt like she “got” this book from the beginning. I am an understated writer to a fault, and she pushed me to be less subtle, which I think improved the book immensely. I was able to trust the editing process more than I ever had before.

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

For one, I never thought I would use my high school Russian! I am a big believer in serendipity in the process. Winterland was initially going to be set entirely in Brooklyn, but I read an article about Norilsk, where the novel is set, and it just took root in my imagination.

I don’t outline or do much planning when I write. I generally know the beginning and the end, which makes for many surprises along the way.

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

I hope Winterland feels transportive, a book readers can immerse themselves in. It’s set in the not-too-distant past, but the Soviet Union is a vanished place, despite some eerie similarities of late. Much of the novel takes place in a city carved out of the Arctic by gulag labor, one that is still closed to anyone not granted permission to enter, so to me it has an otherworldly quality.

And, of course, I want readers to feel for the characters, especially Anya, to follow her from age eight into adulthood. I have always been drawn to the idea of extraordinary stories behind ordinary lives. She could be someone you see on the subway and she has this remarkable past.

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

My very first writing teacher used to call excess setting up of a scene “furniture moving.” Streamline, take out the furniture moving, trust your reader to get from A to B without describing every last detail in between.

Reading Is Down; Book Sales Are Up?

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Yesterday the Telegraph had an article to this effect written by Hannah Boland, the Retail Editor.

Hannah said, “Across Britain, fewer and fewer people are reading books. The data are plain as day.

The number of children who read outside of school every day has halved over the past two decades, while the number of children who say they enjoy reading in their spare time is down by 36pc.

Among adults, reading numbers are also in freefall. In a YouGov survey last year, two in five people said they had not read or listened to a book in the past year – compared with around a quarter of adults in 2001.

For Waterstones, figures such as these would be expected to raise alarm bells. With the high street in crisis, you would think the decline of reading would put businesses such as Waterstones next in line to face the chop.

Yet the mood is anything but sombre at Britain’s biggest bookseller. In fact, Waterstones’ owners are so confident in the business that they are gearing up for a multibillion-pound stock market listing, with a float expected as soon as this summer.

This month, it emerged that Elliott Advisors, the company’s owner, had lined up advisers at Rothschild to work on the process.

The private equity group is preparing to list both Waterstones and its US cousin Barnes & Noble together as one business.

In a sign of just how well Waterstones appears to be doing, Elliott is understood to be leaning towards the London Stock Exchange for a debut of the combined company.

James Daunt, the bookseller’s lauded chief executive who also runs Barnes & Noble, is himself a Briton.

Daunt, who runs both booksellers, described 2025 as a “fantastic year for us”, with both the US and UK businesses expanding into new areas.

Barnes & Noble opened 67 new stores while Waterstone is adding around 10 new shops a year, even though expansion is harder given it is so well-established.

“Stories of declines in reading evidently do not correlate to book buying,” he says. “Publishers and independent booksellers, as well as ourselves, are all doing well in both the US and the UK.”

The figures back him up. The number of independent booksellers across the UK rose slightly last year, even as the high street was struck by a series of retail collapses and store closures.

Between them, Barnes & Noble and Waterstones made a profit of $400m (£300m) last year, with sales standing at $3bn.

That is despite Barnes & Noble facing the same problem with declining reading numbers as Waterstones. A study by the University of Florida in August found that the number of Americans reading for pleasure had plunged by 40pc over the past 20 years.

Official accounts show that Waterstones’ sales rose to £565.6m for the 12 months to May 3, compared with £528.4m a year earlier, according to documents published on Companies House this week. It made pre-tax profits of £40m for the year.

Barnes & Noble opened 67 new stores while Waterstone is adding around 10 new shops a year, even though expansion is harder given it is so well-established.

Waterstones recently said it had been boosted by growing demand for “romantasy” novels – known colloquially as fairy porn.

These fantastical tales of heroines being swept off their feet by knights and wizards have gained huge numbers of fans among British women.

Sarah J Maas, author of romantasy novel A Court of Thorns and Roses, has sold more than 75 million copies of her books globally. Publisher Bloomsbury said demand for Maas’s books helped it to the highest first-half sales and earnings in its history last year.

Elliott is understood to be planning to remain as the biggest shareholder in the combined bookselling business for some time following the market debut, which may give new investors more confidence in its future.

One banking source suggested now was as good a time as any for Elliott to kick off the process of listing Waterstones on the stock market and realising some return on its investment.

“Everything is a bit s–t,” they said. “But that’s not going to change anytime soon and there have been so few returns back on private equity that if they can, they probably should.”

For Daunt, his focus continues to be on the day-to-day. Over the past week, he has been travelling down the west coast of the US to visit Barnes & Noble shops. Despite falling reader numbers across both the US and UK, Daunt says stores are thriving.

“Bookselling is presently vibrant,” he says.

Soon he will find out if investors agree.”

Just Jump

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Harry Bingham, the Founder and CEO of Jericho Writers, makes a good point about the inertia we sometimes feel as writers.

He says, “Just Jump!”

Harry says, “

Ray Bradbury, the author of Farenheit 451 and much else, was a fan of the future. A fan of boldness and technological adventure.  In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business because we’d be cynical: ‘It’s gonna go wrong.’ Or ‘She’s going to hurt me.’ Or ‘I had a couple of bad love affairs so therefore …’ Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”  That cliff-jumper is you. It’s me. It’s all of us.  It’s certainly true for any first-time novelist. My first book was a giant 180,000 words long. (And yes, it went to print at that length. And no, it’s not a length that publishers are especially looking for. But if a book is good enough, the length is kinda immaterial.)  I was naïve. I literally had no idea that writing a book and getting it published might be hard. I just assumed I could do it, and would do it. My track record (Oxford University, fancy American bank) was one of achievement. I knew I liked reading. I’d always assumed I’d end up being an author. So: write a book – how hard could it be? I knew how to write a sentence, so just do that over and over, and I’d have a book.  Everyone receiving this email is less naïve. The tone of voice needed for a fast commercial adventure-caper was not the same tone as that had produced success in Oxford philosophy essays. Once I’d written 180,000 words, I looked back at the start and realised it was … ahem, in need of vigorous editing. The kind of editing that involved selecting 60,000 words and hitting Delete. So I deleted the rubbish and rewrote it. Wrote it better.   But:  That wasn’t a failure. It was the second most important step on the road to success. The most important was writing the first word, the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter. The most important step is always the same: it’s jumping off the cliff in the first place.  Deleting 60,000 words was the next crucial step: acknowledging that what I’d done wasn’t good enough; that more work could fix it; that I needed to design and use some better wings.  But you don’t get to the better-wing-design stage until you’ve got to the plummeting-downwards-out-of-control stage. You need them both.  And honestly: the challenges probably get a little bit less as you write more books, get them published, get paid, learn the industry, build a readership. But each book is its own cliff – its own well of uncertainty.  As you know, I’m a huge believer in nailing an elevator pitch before you start writing. I don’t care about pretty formulations – I don’t mind whether you have the kind of phrase that would look good on a book jacket or movie poster. But a list of ingredients that would spark interest in a potential book-buyer? That’s essential.  But oh sweet lord, there is a huge gap between knowing that you have, in theory, a commercially viable novel and actually making it so. I have sometimes written books that flowed, start to finish, with no huge mid-point challenges, but those have been the exception. Mostly, there’s been a hole – a gap – a problem.  I’m not a huge fan of pre-planning novels in vast detail. (But do what you like: it’s whatever works for you.) The only way to find that hole is to leap off the cliff. It’s the flying through the air that tells you what wings you need.  So jump.  Be uncertain.  Jump anyway.  Take the biggest boldest leap you can, knowing that you don’t have the answers.  Just jump.  Jump knowing that your wings aren’t ready. They get born by jumping. Wings that surprise you and delight you and complete you.  So jump.  Good luck. And happy Christmas.     

Could AI Write a War and Peace?

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In last Saturday’s Telegraph there was an article by Tom McArdle with the title “Waterstones chief: AI could produce the next War and Peace”.

James Daunt, CEO, Waterstones and Barnes & Nobel

THE chief exec­ut­ive of Water­stones has said he is open to the com­pany selling books cre­ated by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, as long as they are clearly labelled.

James Daunt said it would be “up to the reader” whether to pur­chase them if they end up on his stores’ book­shelves.

There are major con­cerns from authors about the impact AI-gen­er­ated con­tent will have on the book industry, after a recent study found most writers feared their jobs were at risk from the tech­no­logy.

But Mr Daunt, who has been the CEO of Water­stones since 2011, told BBC’s Big Boss pod­cast that AI could pro­duce “the next War and Peace”.

“There’s a huge pro­lif­er­a­tion of AI-gen­er­ated con­tent and most of it is not books that we should be selling,” he said. “Hope­fully, pub­lish­ers avoid it; we as book­sellers would cer­tainly, nat­ur­ally and instinct­ively, dis­dain it.”

A Uni­versity of Cam­bridge study last month found wide­spread con­cerns from nov­el­ists about their jobs being replaced by the tech­no­logy and fears that work writ­ten by humans could become “an expens­ive lux­ury”.

In response, Mr Daunt said: “At the more lit­er­ary end I don’t see that being the case. There is a clear iden­ti­fic­a­tion of read­ers with authors, and book­sellers play an import­ant role in join­ing authors and read­ers.

“That does require a real per­son.

“As a book­seller, we sell what pub­lish­ers pub­lish, but I can say that, instinct­ively, that is something we would recoil [from]. It’s really import­ant that authors earn a liv­ing.”

Asked whether the high-street book­shop would sell AI books, he said: “We would never inten­tion­ally sell an AI-gen­er­ated book that was dis­guising itself as being other than that.”

When pressed on whether he would con­sider it if they were clearly labelled, he respon­ded: “Yeah, if it was clear what it was, then I think it’s up to the reader.

“Do I think that our book­sellers are likely to put those kinds of books front and centre? I would be sur­prised.”

He warned that given the exor­bit­ant sums of money being spent by tech com­pan­ies on AI, it was hard to know its lim­its.

“Who’s to know,” he said. “They are spend­ing tril­lions and tril­lions on AI and maybe it’s going to pro­duce the next War and Peace. If people want to read that book – AI-gen­er­ated or not – we will be selling it. As long as it doesn’t pre­tend to be something that it isn’t.”