Literary Links

The Extreme Life and Philosophy of Hunter S. Thompson: Gonzo Journalism and the American Condition

A short introduction, with lots of related links, to the life and work of Hunter S. Thompson, commonly known as the father of “gonzo journalism”:

Gonzo journalism . . . actually has a serious question to ask: “Are not the particular subjective filters by which facts and events are processed and imagined in a moment in history as relevant as the facts themselves in understanding the truth of that moment, or at least a slice of the truth?”

Why We Turn to Detective Fiction in Times of Upheaval

Irish novelist Louise Hegarty attributes the popularity of detective fiction to two inherent human needs: (1) the desire for a narrative that makes sense of things, and (2) the expectation of fair play, in which the reader has as much chance as the fictional character of solving the puzzle posed by the story.

 We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent – here’s how

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But here’s the truth: it possesses none of those qualities. It is not human. And presenting it as if it were? That’s dangerous. Because it’s convincing. And nothing is more dangerous than a convincing illusion.

Guillaume Thierry, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Bangor University, explains that “AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.” 

Thierry suggests we keep reminding ourselves of AI’s lack of human consciousness by refusing to give it human traits such as “a human face, voice or tone.”

I think he’s describing the basic problem I had recently with the novel Annie Bot.

The 30 best fiction books of the last 30 years

To celebrate the 30^th anniversary of its Festival of Books, the Los Angeles Times has put together this list of the best books published in the last 30 years. This link is to the fiction list, but there are also links for nonfiction, poetry organizations, and the rise and fall of YA literature. 

There’s a book in this book!

From BookPage: “We love when authors get meta by placing a second text—a novel, play or diary—within the first. Here are our four picks for books featuring nested stories.”

Scholars Have Lost the Plot!

Milan Terlunen addresses us readers who like to read for what happens:

But when you studied literature in school or university, I expect that you were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that this plot-focused way of reading was simplistic, and that you were trained to read in new ways where plot was largely irrelevant. The message is: Only amateurs read for the plot.

I admit that this attitude about reading and discussing literature is one of the many reasons why I didn’t finish my Ph.D. in literature. But there’s hope for overcoming this gap between elite readers and the rest of us, Terlunen says. “I see glimmers of what the discipline might become in two new scholarly books, which hint at a future for literary scholarship if it learns to properly value the common experience of reading for the plot.”

He even admits that literary scholarship needs those of us who read for the plot: “we especially need the ways you read in your everyday life, as a reality check on the claims we make about how literature exists in the world.”

RFK Jr. said many autistic people will never write a poem − even though there’s a rich history of neurodivergent poets and writers

Bradley J. Irish, associate professor of English at Arizona State University, refutes recent remarks by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., that many autistic people will “never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date.”

Irish describes himself as “an autistic English professor who studies literature and neurodiversity.” Here he discusses the “remarkable corpus of poetry written by autistic people, who have also written novels, plays and virtually any kind of literature imaginable.”

The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain

“Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.”

In this thought-provoking piece Lauren Michele Jackson, a contributing writer at The New Yorker and an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, re-examines author Mark Twain’s place in American literary history. 

Jackson writes that “Twain turned authorship into celebrity, and celebrity into product.” He “kept throwing his energy, and his money, into entrepreneurial ventures he was temperamentally unfit to manage.” He was happy to write when the writing came easily, but he was unwilling to spend effort on details that might have improved his literary works. As a result, he wasted “much time on extraliterary pursuits” aimed at making money. 

By the time Twain died in 1910, “American literature was beginning to regard itself as a tradition.” Jackson calls Jim from Huckleberry Finn “both a character and a problem: a caricature who refuses to stay flat, a man rendered with dignity and deepening care, but also within the limits of white fantasy”:

We’re not done with Jim because Twain wasn’t. Perhaps this is what we want from him still—not sanctity or scandal but a space of comic disorder where the rules of the novel, and the Republic, could be stretched, tested, and maybe gamed. If Twain belongs to anyone now, it’s the writers making mischief in the structures he left behind—not revering him but inhabiting him.

Let Us Help You Find Your Next Book: Fantasy

A couple of weeks ago I cited an article about how fantasy deals with issues of power. 

This article from The New York Times caught my eye as a possible source for books illustrating this point. Have you read any of the books recommended here? 

© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown