Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
The Most Interesting AI-Generated Story Yet
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, touted a story “written” by their LLM is response to the prompt: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” The resulting story is, I think it is fair to say, the most interesting “creative writing” product I have seen, and not because it is necessarily good, but because it is interestingly messy, plausible, and not without some virtues. Lincoln Michel goes sentence-level deep here,and I found myself nodding along to most of his analysis. For my part, it fall into a literary uncanny valley, neither bad enough to be laughable nor good enough to be “lifelike.” The strangeness of it is then all the more compelling and disturbing.
The 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award Winners Announced
The big story is that James did not in fact win in the fiction category. The winner, which I have not read so I will withold any “but whyyyyyy” reactions, is My Friends by Hisham Matar. It is been in and around several awards so I wouldn’t say it is a surprise necessarily. No wait, I think it actually kind of is. Challenger winning in Nonfiction and There’s Always This Year in Criticism (still a puzzle why it is there) are terrific outcomes. Full list of winners, including Best First Book and Translation, listed here.