David Ulin

@namwalien I agree completely.

I don't believe it will. Readers are much more astute than you seem to believe. Clean, average, constitutively uninventive prose has an expiration date. It might sell but it won't last! If you disagree, if you think it's so great, why are you averse to labeling it AI-generated?

"If A.I. is capable of producing gripping fiction, and readers and editors are unable to discern its origins..." Then this article wouldn't exist? Bizarre to keep predicting this 'inevitability.' Once it happens, no one will care. But it hasn't happened! nytimes.com/2026/03/19/boo…

@Lisa_See Nothing surprises me anymore.

I’m speechless.

@Frannydink @mercedesschlapp Or any other kind of journalist either.

@mercedesschlapp No one believes Nick Shirley. And, for the record, he isn't an "independent journalist."

Fraud in Governor Gavin Newsom’s California isn’t hiding anymore—it’s parked out front in luxury cars.

Another day working at Deep Vellum, another day bringing translated literature to readers, another day breaking publisher’s marketplace trying to submit a deal report for a trilingual book… no where to add translators to announcements… yet translators are absolutely essential!!

Thinking of this paragraph from Ian Penman’s book on Erik Satie: “Too many studies of modernity seem to focus exclusively on abjection, entropy, gloom . . . no one seems to want to entertain the notion that it might also be enormous fun.”

If you're good at the internet and like poetry, come work with me. @PoetryFound is hiring a social media associate: $70K-$78K per year, based in Chicago recruiting.paylocity.com/Recruiting/Job…

“It is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one, then you are better off alone. But there are editors so rare and so important that they are worth searching for, and you always know when you have one.” —Toni Morrison buff.ly/L7Pcots

@DavidBiespiel @AndrewWittstadt Agree. This thread is remarkably ignorant, even for this tired and irrelevant subject.

@AndrewWittstadt “Most MFA faculty scared of their own authority (partially because students revolt/complain if you tell them poem needs work…)--lean on political/moral authority instead of their own taste...” = Never, not once, have I been afraid of a student’s response to my comments in 40 yrs

This entire thing is downstream of the lack of authority crisis in literature and art. Most MFA faculty are scared of their own authority (partially because students revolt and complain if you tell them a poem needs some work, but other reasons too)--so they lean on political and moral authority instead of their own taste and judgment of a work of art. She's not wrong that MFA programs feed the same repetitive, boring work to publishers over and over again, but she is misdiagnosing the problem. It's that most in the industry at all levels are using something other than taste and judgement in order to decide what is "worthy" of publication or a fully funded grad program acceptance, etc Many still deny that the political obsessions of the last decade or so really destroyed this industry more than anything else, but that is in fact what has happened. Everyone is just shrugging their collective shoulders and not understanding why they are bored with reading the same 2nd and 3rd gen immigrant stories over and over again.

@MattWalshBlog Oh please. Yes, McCarthy has written some great books but the notion that we’ve seen the last of the truly great writers represents the height of tunnel visioned ignorance. Try reading something from this century.

Reading Blood Meridian. I wonder if there will ever be an author like Cormac McCarthy again, or if we’ve seen the last of the truly great writers. Every sentence he composes is art, like a painting. You see and feel what he’s trying to convey. He wrestles with big things, the human condition, good and evil. He doesn’t give you answers but he leaves you with a lot to think about. An absolute master of his craft. Not the last, I hope, but I don’t know.

@WTSchultz I DO love Angels (my favorite ending, perhaps, in literature), as well as Jesus' Son, Train Dreams, and Seek. He's a fantastic reporter and essayist, for which he doesn't get enough credit. And the poems, many of which are transcendent. /2

@WTSchultz The unevenness part of the point for me. It's what makes the writing feel so alive. Even in books that don't completely work -- Already Dead, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, and (yes) Tree of Smoke -- there are so many bits of brilliance. /1

The best film this year (I say) is TRAIN DREAMS

Planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.

@HamiltonCain This has not been my experience.

Yep.

@WTSchultz One of his best books, I think.

@davidulin and somehow, though I've read so much of him, I didn't even know it was based on a Denis Johnson book

“As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.” —Ernest Hemingway buff.ly/6tmEZ4R

@ColeHenri This is lovely, especially the turn at the end. Thanks for posting.

My neighbor Stuart sent me a picture from this week's New Yorker. Nothing gold can stay.

@g_e_howard @TheLincoln Love that novel so much.

@davidulin @TheLincoln David, I recommended that on a different thread about this!

What are the best novels about nothing?

@danro_art London SS. (Mich Jones's early band.)

Boston,Kansas, Chicago all bands named after cities in the u.s. Do we have any u.k. bands named after towns or cities?? Can't think of any