Outwardly, Wrecks is not a horror novel in the way Lamb is, but it shares that book’s grim sense of environmental collapse. It is set in a near-future London where the heat is stifling, endless, all-encompassing...

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Then there’s the weather. Hill is an intensely physical writer. His characters are firmly embed­ded in and shaped by their environment. With Lamb, it’s the spread of an invasive mould that infiltrates every nook and cranny, including the human body. With Wrecks, it’s the oppressive, stifling atmosphere caused by a heat dome cov­ering London: “the lawn… tinder-dry, the patio flags untouchable, the very concept of dew a strange fantasy.” Where I am, it’s winter, and yet I still felt the sweat collecting in the folds of Jim’s flesh, “mak[ing] him itch, weld[ing] his scrotum to his thighs.” (A perk of the Courser job is the van’s excellent air conditioning.)

I’d say that Hill’s depiction of the London heat dome and the wildfires ravaging the Peak Dis­trict is prescient given this summer’s firestorms across Europe (especially Spain), but really Hill is writing about what we’re all seeing, what so many of us are experiencing. And that sense of inevitability, that impression that we’ve lost our grip on the future as climate change worsens, plays into the story’s broader themes as Jim in­exorably loses agency. He is like Teddy and Eric from earlier in the novel, unable to correct course or avoid the impending crash. Bleak, I know. But, similar to M. John Harrison’s astonishing novel The End of Everything, which has a comparably nightmarish, dislocated atmosphere, Wrecks offers the barest hint of a happy ending, of find­ing closure amongst all the ruin and wreckage.

Louise Erdrich

Joy Harjo

Richard Wagamese

Tommy Orange

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Natalie Diaz

Dennis E. Staples

Layli Long Soldier

N. Scott Momaday

Elise Paschen

Terese Marie Mailhot

Leslie Marmon Silko

Sherman Alexie

The Thélyson Orélien controversy raises new questions about whether detection software can be trusted

A lot of people here might already be aware of how AI checkers are unreliable at best, and more often just terrible. What I learned from this article is that they might actually harm some groups of people more than others.

NOTE: The original title of this article was "Bestselling Novelist Dropped from Major Prize over Suspected AI Use". I added the extra context because people might not read the body of the post.

Here are some excerpts that I thought were relevant, with bold emphasis applied by me. Please check out the full article if you want more context outside of what I am highlighting here:

This time, the controversy surrounds C’était ça ou mourir, the first novel by Haitian Canadian author Thélyson Orélien, which has already become a huge success in France. On September 26, the prestigious Académie Goncourt announced it was dropping the title from the longlist for its eponymous literary prize because the prize administrators had concluded it was written with the help of AI. The AI-detection software Pangram determined there was a 100 percent chance the novel was at least in part AI generated.

The author denies using AI, and his French publisher, Grasset, has come out strongly in his defence. Grasset said in a statement that it “strongly objected” to the allegations, which it characterized as “malicious.” The Globe and Mail quoted the French publisher as calling the accusations against Orélien “fake news.” His original French-language Canadian publisher, by contrast, has taken a more measured response to the allegations. The Quebec publisher, Les Éditions du Boréal, told the New York Times, “[A]t this stage, it is impossible for us to confirm or deny the allegations the author is facing.” They went on to say that it is important “not to draw hasty conclusions.”

This is not the first time an award-nominated author has faced accusations of using AI to create written work. Earlier this year, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize encountered criticism after Jamir Nazir’s regional winner, “The Serpent in the Grove,” was accused by social media users of having been written with AI. After a review that included interviews with all the regional winners and examinations of early drafts, edits, and time-stamped emails, the organization that runs the award decided there was no basis to believe Nazir used AI in his writing. The story went on to win the overall Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

The issue of false positives is not incidental: somewhere around 90 percent of the texts used to train large language models are in English, so the French language would throw up difficulties for AI checkers, which themselves use AI to make their determinations. In addition, Orélien is Haitian by background and employs a style of writing heavily influenced by Caribbean oral tradition, which relies on repetition and other tropes often cited as determinants of AI assistance. “I come from a Haitian and Caribbean literary tradition in which poetry, imagery, repetition, and rhythm carry a living voice,” he said in a statement quoted by the CBC. “One might debate my style, but treating its techniques as evidence of artificial intelligence has nothing to do with literary criticism.”

Sutherland, who, like Orélien, is Black, made a similar observation to the Globe about her award-winning story. “This story is rooted in Vincentian oral storytelling tradition, which by nature is formulaic and relies on repetition, rhythm, and patterned language as core elements of their structure,” she said.

The biases and blind spots in AI-detection software are only one issue. Equally troubling is the notion of using AI to detect AI use, an apparent tautology that doesn’t have many safeguards or levels of verifiability. Then there are the people using the software themselves. The accusations against Orélien arose via an anonymous X account run in part by Samuel Fitoussi, a journalist at the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro. His stated reason for using the account to publicize his accusation, according to the New York Times, is that “he thought an anonymous account would be trusted more than his column in a right-leaning newspaper.” Fitoussi may be correct about that, if only because the French right wing has become increasingly antipathetic to immigrant communities in the country.

Stumbled upon this article yesterday. Some food for thought, about something I for sure have taken for granted. What do you think?

LEILA FADEL, HOST: Nearly three years since the start of the war in Gaza in response to a devastating Hamas attack on Israel, journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed has written an account detailing the period, October 7, 2023, to January of 2025. It's focused on the Biden administration's decisions in that time. And it's called "Crossing The Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, And Israel's War In Gaza."

...

FADEL: I'm thinking of a line that you had kind of near the end of your book. And you wrote, in less than two years, Joe Biden irreversibly changed America's role in Israel-Palestine and may have permanently altered America's approach to foreign affairs. Say more.

AHMED: The Biden administration's Gaza policy created a more dangerous world for us all. It's a period that reshapes the standards of warfare. It becomes a question not only of danger and influence globally, but a question of democratic accountability to what Americans want their country to be doing on the world stage.

FADEL: Right, because all of the leading officials that were involved are still successfully employed.

AHMED: And positioning themselves for future administrations. A lot of these officials are now saying, well, in retrospect, I would've done things differently, but under President Biden, it wasn't possible. My book makes the argument and offers significant evidence that we shouldn't let that line be sufficient, that we actually should hold these officials responsible for their choices at junctures where they could have saved Palestinian lives and also Israeli lives - and gotten us off a path, I really feel, a path from enabling Israeli escalation in Gaza, consistent escalation then into Lebanon, into now the Iran war and real risk to American lives and many others.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260921173548/https://www.npr.org/2026/09/21/nx-s1-5761237/crossing-the-red-line-examines-the-biden-administration-and-israels-war-in-gaza

I finished this recently and found it incredible. There was so much history I was completely ignorant to. I never knew the U.S. controlled The Phillipines, or that we took so much of Spain's empire.

Highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the full extent of the U.S.'s imperialism. I will say it has many parts that are difficult to read, especially the events in Manila.

Your Kobo Knows Every Book You've Ever Read

See https://github.com/seandheath/koboctl

Yet Under the Falls stands apart from these texts because, as the name Stone Mountain and its Confederate associations should imply, Russo links his perennial theme of white working-class struggle and misery—what we might call the Gloversville theme—to the South’s “Lost Cause” and, more broadly, to white racist laments for a bygone era. Here, more than in any of his other novels, Russo tempers his personal attachment to a Rust Belt story with a new awareness of how white Americans have long manipulated facts to generate a self-serving and hateful version of the past. The text’s invocation of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol highlights Russo's interest in distinguishing the white workers of his novel from the “young white men waving Nazi flags and members of the KKK and conspiracy-theory-stoked militiamen” whom he decried in a recent Lit Hub essay.

To be sure, Under the Falls takes regional history seriously through a steady focus on Tyler and his ambivalent feelings about the area. The novel begins with Tyler and his band arriving in Stone Mountain to play a benefit show for Doc, a friend rendered paraplegic by a terrible fall years before. Already uneasy about his return after decades away, Tyler grows even more anxious when Doc informs him that “not everybody on the Mountain is a Tyler Sinclair fan.” Doc explains: “It’s not just that you made all that money, […] It’s that you made it writing songs about us. […] Where’s our cut? is how they look at it.” “The Long Fall,” Tyler’s most famous song, offers ready ammunition to his detractors: inspired by Doc’s accident, the tune allegorizes the town’s economic demise and social crisis. Tyler has turned his friend’s suffering and his community’s misery into popular music and benefited in the process.

I’ll try to be clear for once, to be real, to speak normally. I’m obsessed, with you, you’re always on my mind, and I’m always trying to keep up with you, to grab your attention, to have your gaze fixed upon me.

This book was supposed to be a comfortable read to soothe my brain after months of reading theory. Objectively speaking, it is a simple and easy pop-psychology book destined to lay readers, despite its well cited and researched nature. (The study is based on the findings of a large set of questionnaires and interviews). However, I did not expect that every paragraph and every phrase I read would force me back to my past romantic experiences in order to reflect upon them in light of my newly gained knowledge.

Limerence is, to put it simply, the state of “being in love.” It is distinct from love per se, and it is not sexual desire, although all three can coexist. Poets, philosophers, theologians and all sorts of intellectuals have conceived of such a phenomenon, giving it different labels throughout history, such as "romantic love," "erotic love," "love spark," etc.

Tennov posits that “limerence is, above all else, a mental activity. It is an interpretation of events, rather than the events themselves.” That limerence is a mental activity, see an interpretation of real events, implies the existence of a limerent subject on the one hand, and a limerent object (LO) on the other. An entire emotional revolution could be brewing within the limerent person that may perhaps be fully unknown by LO. For limerence is not so much about LO as much as it is about the feelings and emotions one has for LO.

Limerence creates above all a desire for reciprocation within the limerent person. It is the ultimate goal and achievement of limerence. Reciprocation could be expressed in many different ways: for example, it could be sexual intercourse, a relationship, or even a fruitful confession of love. Once reciprocation is achieved, limerence arrives at its consummation, “in which the bliss of reciprocation is gradually either blended into a lasting love or replaced by less positive feelings.” However, reciprocation is not always achieved, and sometimes it is rendered uncertain or almost impossible due to circumstances: this is what we call unrequited love. Regardless, what fuels limerence is that desire for reciprocation and mutuality, and will continue as long as there is even a slimmer of hope in the mind of the limerent.

Just as all roads once led to Rome, when your limerence for someone has crystallized, all events, associations, stimuli, experience return your thoughts to LO with unnerving consistency. (Ch. 2)

One common symptom of limerence is obsession with LO. Some people dream of their LO while others daydream of them. Everything and anything could be a source of romantic reverie. Though such a phenomenon differs from one person to another depending on the degree of limerence which incessantly fluctuates.

Limerence can have positive effects on its subject and the people around them. It is commonly a motivator for self-improvement and has been throughout history the main inspiration for lots of artistic works of different kinds. However, it is not devoid of negative effects: antisocial behavior, intrusive thoughts, extreme moodiness, severe grief and sorrow following rejection, and so on. This promoted psychoanalysts, according to Tennov, to reduce limerence to a pathological, irrational state of the mind. (This claim was moreso confirmed when I discussed the book with a psychology major). To them, limerence is not “true love.” According to Maslow, for instance, “B-lovers [true lovers] are not unreasonably jealous and they are not blind. It is the other, damaging D-love [limerence] which blinds you. In true love (B-love) you are able to perceive your lover clearly and penetratingly.” Sociologist Paul Bohannan puts it as such:

“romantic love” is a condition in which your “love fantasies become ends in themselves.” You are blinded to LO’s “real” personality because you refuse to look at the facts.

There is truth in the claim that limerence is irrational. It is not love for the other based on mutual concern and affection, but it is rather love for love itself. Limerence is selfish in the sense that it disregards the person behind LO and reduces them to an abstracted ideal in the mind of the limerent. Tennov concedes to this, yet she found her respondents and informants to be quite aware of how illogical their limerent state is. She concludes that “while it is illogical, it is also normal, and therefore normal human beings can be illogical,” thus dismissing the psychoanalytical approach of pathologizing limerence.

Limerence is quite a universal experience that transcends human cultures. Yet it is not an experience shared by everyone. Tennov admits the existence of people, as her questionnaire and interviews have shown, who are nonlimerent. This raises more unanswerable questions about the nature of limerence and its origins.

In my personal opinion, and as someone who has experienced limerence, I do not believe it is pathological, despite how irrational or illogical I could have behaved at times. True, limerence is unsustainable if not transformed into true love, which is what must be sought after. That being said, I cannot view limerence as anything other than normal, just because of how ingrained it is in our culture: the music, the folkloric tales, the literature, the language, and so on. I do not seek after the feeling, nor do I wish to stay in its grasp, and yet I accept it as something normal.

I also do not agree with the author's claim that limerence is not a cultural invention. It is so in the sense that the way it is expressed differs among human societies. Though this ought not diminish from its material existence as a “complex involuntary human reaction pattern.”

The book, while it doesn't answer many of the mysteries behind limerence, doesn't shy away from asking the tough questions. I was quite pleased that the author even discussed the question of sexual difference and sexuality and their role in shaping limerence

OC review by @Tatar_Nobility@lemmy.ml

I'm having trouble putting my feelings about this book into words.

How do I go about describing the shattering of a window I didn't know I was peeking through? A slap in the face from someone I didn't know could exist?

My Kindle melted in my hands as I read. The plastic softened and turned to skin and the screen bent and twisted into eyes and a mouth and a nose, a face. I stared at the eyes, and as the words flickered and tears welled, I heard the mouth move to whisper and then speak and then scream, and I know it was the truth what it said.

bell hooks was a witch; of that, at least, I'm sure.

The Will to Change is honest, sober, and painfully aware of what it is that makes men men, and the systems that rip their nature from them. It describes the iron grip that crushes and shapes boys into loveless archetypes, writhing in a sea of needles that keeps them from being truly human; that same hand that puppeteers their mothers and sisters and lovers, and their fathers and brothers and friends, the same hand that sews their mouths shut as it rips their minds to shreds and chokes their hearts. This book is an indictment of patriarchy not just because of what it does to women, but especially for what it does to men; what it takes from them and the promises it shatters and the silence it demands.

That being said, every word is loving. It is a deep, powerful, raw yearning for love, for healing, for companionship and community. Every chapter begs men to reconsider, to change, to choose love and forego their pain and hurt, to choose to be people instead of dominators and patriarchs, to choose peace instead of violence and war. The Will to Change looks men in the eye and sees past the stoic veneer patriarchy demands and offers release: release from loveless marriages, release from unfulfilling sex, release from violence and grief, release from endless work, release from the burden of living according to a diseased and corrosive script instead of according to our needs and desires. Even as it ravages traditional notions of masculinity and maleness, the feminism of The Will to Change is a hand outstretched and a warm embrace; a guide and a tutor for a new kind of man that can live free and truly love.

And that's what I loved most about it. Anyone can point out the issues, and in fact many do: the male loneliness epidemic, men are unhappy, the sexual marketplace is a mess, nothing is good for men... Any struggling man or boy will find that their issues are recognized, that their strife is known and acknowledged, but the answers are always unsatisfying. You need to be more violent, more isolated, more hateful. Distrust, deny, control, dominate. Those are the answers you hear so very often. Then, as was already the case when the book was first published over 20 years ago, things got worse for the men that stuck with the old system, that corrosive and hateful system named with such a dreadfully misconstrued word as patriarchy. But The Will to Change is different: it offers a solution rooted in love and compassion. It moves away from the destruction that pervades traditional masculinity and describes a better future for men. It shows a glimpse of a nurturing masculinity, a kind masculinity, a passionate masculinity; it shows men that there's a path forward where the promises of the patriarchy, of pleasure and wholeness and self, can be fulfilled, away from pain and domination. The lonely man, the angry man, the hurt man, they all can read this book and find a guiding light.

bell hooks saw men and she makes a feminism that saves them. She truly saw and understood and loved, even as men hated and raged and hurt she loved, and as they thrashed around sightless and deaf and lost she loved, and she loved, and she loved, and she says that, to love, men need the will to change. Ultimately, I agree.

I only wish, one day, I can love as she so dearly hoped I would.

---

Rating: READ IT NOW

Check it out here!

Review by @gon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

As AI tech companies increasingly buy and destroy books to feed to their AI models, Anna's Archive is calling for volunteers to help preserve them for the public record

The symbol for Amazon's VGT3, the Las Vegas facility where it scans book for AI training data.

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.

“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in a statement.

The world’s AI companies are constantly looking for, and spending extreme resources to locate, more material to train their AI models. With books, that sometimes means destroying them in the process, something that large parts of the public have spoken up against, and which we can now confirm Amazon is doing.

In July, I published a story about booksellers who reported a historical spike in sales starting in the past year. They suspected this spike in sales was due to AI companies acquiring any books they can in search of new training data. Printed books are valuable as training data because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which AI companies have already scraped. The data is also conveniently organized and, if the book was printed before 2022, is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text, which can make any AI model that is trained on it worse via a recursive process called “model collapse.”

📖 Do you know work at a facility where you scan books? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.

These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.

In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order. 404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment

The Study

In a study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, 1,682 adults were asked to read one of six short stories, three of which were written by humans and three by ChatGPT. Each AI story had a similar theme to one of the human-authored works.

The team told participants whether their story was written by a human or AI, but this information was not always correct. The researchers then asked participants to rate how absorbing and engaging they found the story, and its quality.

Participants who read an AI-generated story rated it as more absorbing and of higher quality than those who read a story written by a human. However, participants gave higher ratings to stories they had been told were written by people.

Dr Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a senior author of the research from Villanova University in Pennsylvania, said: “AI systems can already generate short stories that are seen as being at least as good as – if not better than – human-written stories. We should update our views of AI’s abilities accordingly.”

However, Weisberg, who is herself a creative writer, said that did not mean writing should be left to AI, noting that novels produced by tech were probably going to be different from those written by humans.

“We may need to make room for AI-generated novels, and for AI/human co-written novels, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no longer space for us to appreciate the process of human creativity,” she said.