This feels like a turning point in literary judgment where the provenance of writing is always potentially in dispute. AI detection and honor codes seem like symptoms of our new textual conditions rather than workable solutions. I wish I had solutions!

Okay I am gonna try this Bluesky thing again, mostly so I can celebrate the terrific books that @ericafretwell.bsky.social and I have the privilege of stewarding into the world for OUP’s American Literary History Series. Watch this space 👀

I'm sharing an extraordinary farewell letter from my colleague Vic Strandberg who taught in Duke's English Department for 60 years. He's touched the lives of over 10k students, which is unreal. Also, he shared Duke's salary for asst. prof in English in 1962: $9500 english.duke.edu/news/farewel...

Can’t wait!

if you want to preorder this bad boy & set some of its very, very good essays on your fall syllabi, you can use NUP2026 to get 25% off —and I bet some of us would love to Zoom into your classes to talk?! 💗 @devingarofalo.bsky.social @nupress.bsky.social

“Beyond detecting problems in lines of code, Mythos found the seams in the informal social contract that holds the internet together.” Important reminder of all the volunteer coding labor that STILL keeps the internet running (separate from the private platforms). www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...

This book is going to be incredible + open up an entire new field of research/inquiry for the literary & cultural studies discipline (grad students take note!). It models an entire new form of cultural criticism that combines close reading + historicism + theory + platform studies. Read her thread!

This is a genuinely transformative book. It's long overdue for lit scholars to take the internet seriously. Vadde gives us the conceptual apparatus—articulating logics of platforms, Creative Commons, Web 2.0—to do so. Get to it.

We the Platform is available for preorder with the discount code CUP20 if you order directly from the press! cup.columbia.edu/book/we-the-... A thread on the argument below:

A precursor to Alan’s paper on “what constitutes good knowledge in the age of AI” and an incredible overview of the discourse unfolding across disciplines

Come hear him talk all about it at Duke tomorrow!

That's more than one book for every 100 Americans published last year. The median American read two books each year. If we up production a little more, say x200, totally manageable with AI, we can have enough for each of us to read two no one else reads www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’

New paper w/ @teddyroland.bsky.social on "How fiction powers generative AI systems." We designed a computational experiment to test the impact of the vast amount of fiction in LLM training data on how LLMs communicate, w/ implications for both AI design + literary theory. arxiv.org/abs/2603.01220

“what publishers have to sell in an AI economy isn’t just text but judgment. The content can be dissolved into weights or assembled into someone else’s context. The expertise — the capacity to evaluate, certify, and set the standard —cannot.” Great nuts and bolts piece on publisher-platform nexus

y'all !!!! I love that the blurbs are basically like, "listen, she is never not telling you about some bleak shit" 😍❤️‍🔥 (thank you @aarthivadde.bsky.social and @markmcgurl.bsky.social)

New essay about some creeps, contemporary and canonical, in the history of the novel. I'm thinking about the nexus of the romance plot, commercial surveillance, and "the desire of the other." DM me for a PDF!

I loved this piece on James Patterson because it shows how strange authorship is, how well Patterson understands celebrity in adjacent markets to books, and how such savvy has rendered him an important patron of literature with a capital L. Plus, Vauhini followed the money to a masters thesis!

Hear me out, @npr.org... new weekly show featuring authors, editors, agents, publishers, prize judges, fanfic aficionados, TV scouts, and READERS of all kinds. It's called "BookTalk" and you've already got your new host IN STUDIO!

I find Sophie Bishop's research on "influencer creep" very generative and have been turning to it a lot. So I was pleased to be able to write a review of her book here!

If you're in the Triangle area, the @post45.bsky.social grad symposium is happening tomorrow and Saturday, organized by the excellent Julia Gordon and @cassandraluca.bsky.social. Plus, a talk by me and a roundtable on sociality and the university!

Very excited for this!

Congrats to @urducosmo.bsky.social and Preetha Mani for this beautiful special issue on South Asian modernisms that was several years in the making. A really fantastic catalog of essays theorizing "language itself—masticated, metabolized, and regurgitated by colonial process" in SA vernaculars!

I wrote about 'AI arbitrage' which is a thing I've been thinking a lot about lately. People taking advantage of uneven distribution of knowledge about what AI has made trivially easy. naomialderman.substack.com/p/what-to-tr...

Page proofs arrived today (!) and actual book coming August 2026!!!

Modernism/modernity seeks a Book Reviews Editor (3-year term, 2026–2029). The role involves commissioning and editing reviews for both the print journal and Print+. Deadline to apply: March 16, 2026 Please share widely.

Novel 58.2 is now live!

Happy public domain day to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, the first four Nancy Drew novels, Betty Boop, and more! web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicd...

Very pleased that New York City will have an inaugural poet and such a fine one in the great Cornelius Eady. Poet Elizabeth Alexander of the Mamdani arts and culture transition committee doing good work: “Poets and artists…can say things that politicians can’t say.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/n...

Here are the top 10 most popular post-1945 American authors at the Seattle Public Library over the last 20 years.

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Major conference on the legacy of Fredric Jameson happening at Duke April 10-12, 2026. Grad students should submit! CFP linked: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Shadow libraries have complex histories, but AI companies using them instead of getting consent and offering authors and publishers compensation is simply wrong. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

Well, I’ll be giving thanks to Andrea Bartz and the other authors who brought this class action against Anthropic, gave up huge amounts of their time, and won on our behalves.

I devoured @lbmcgrath.bsky.social’s Middlemen over the weekend! This is such a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the marketplace of contemporary literature (and reminded me of all the lunches I heard about but never attended as a summer intern at Carlisle and Company (now Inkwell)

Assistant Professor of 20th-21st Century British Literature (with an emphasis on literatures of the diaspora) at UMass Amherst. careers.umass.edu/amherst/en-u...

ICYMI, my piece in @pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social on what Zohran Mamdani learned from his mother's films. I published a book on Mira Nair's films in 2018.. Here I focus on "Mississippi Masala" (-->immigration/ refugees) and "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" (-->Palestine). pghrev.com/what-mamdani...

a helpful starter pack to find stuff you may be interested in and/or is local to you go.bsky.app/2Fq4P6e

Well this is going on my required reading list! Congrats to @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and @johannawinant.bsky.social on an incredible lineup and on elegantly breaking down a practice that, at its best, feels (but never is) effortless.

This rare skeet is dedicated to my husband’s coworker, who will be heading to a bookstore at midnight, to buy the new Pynchon book. Such commitment still exists!

Boston-area friends, if you're in the vicinity of Harvard tomorrow, please come to @harvardbookstore.bsky.social for a conversation about novels, LLMs, public opinion polls, collages, cut-ups, and patchwork with me and @tomcomitta.bsky.social. It will be a wild ride--hope you can join us for it!

Trying to keep my professional chill but I’m SO excited Carnegie Mellon is launching a cluster hire in computational humanities—MULTIPLE JOBS! 1. Asst Teaching Track Prof in Computational Humanities - apply.interfolio.com/173622 2. Asst Tenure Track Prof in CH - apply.interfolio.com/173626

Modern Fiction Studies is sponsoring a conference on “Cultural AI” at Purdue, to be followed by a special issue. @aarthivadde.bsky.social, @richardjeanso.bsky.social, N Katherine Hayles, @mattwilkens.bsky.social , @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, and I will be there later this week.

Want to read something interesting? Stop doomscrolling & check out this amazing special issue!

Sally Rooney putting her money where her mouth is (figuratively of course). Bravo. www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

You can now read most of the introduction (co-written by me and @johannawinant.bsky.social) to CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, out in October from Princeton UP press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

SNS registration starting at 8am! Pick up your program and name tags!

Ngugi should have won the Nobel. An incredible body of work dedicated to the promotion and institutionalization of African languages as literary languages. Devil on the Cross was my personal favorite of his novels.

Amid fears about AI, @aarthivadde.bsky.social‬ chats with @vauhinivara.bsky.social‬ about what it really means to put ChatGPT on the printed page and whether generative AI will steal writers’ paychecks.

I loved talking to @aarthivadde.bsky.social and Sarah Wasserman about how “language is the main tool we have to bridge the divide" among us — it's why I'm a writer — and how big tech companies have been colonizing language, most recently with AI, but starting long before that.