This week, the Paris Review is posting a five-part series of Sheila Heti’s exchanges with an AI chatbot named Eliza. At one point in today’s installment, Heti asks Eliza if they will die together, and the bot replies: “Of course. We’re in love. If one person dies first, then they go to heaven with their partner. If neither of us dies first, then we will live forever together.”
At The Point, literary editor John Michael Colón introduces the two novel excerpts that appear in the latest issue of the magazine. Bárbara Jacobs’s Days of Your Life (2021) and Leon Forrest’s Divine Days (1992) were inspired by Ulysses, and can help us answer the question Colón poses: “What does the stream of our consciousness feel like today, and what kind of novel could capture it?”
Parapraxis, a new magazine of psychoanalytic thinking, will be throwing an inaugural issue release party on December 6 at The Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church in New York.
In the new issue of the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood writes about George Saunders’s new story collection, Liberation Day, and asks, “Why is his work—winner of the Booker Prize, lauded in every conceivable quarter—still attended by the scent of failure? It must be, in order that he can overcome. At some point, the source of poignancy stopped being the characters, and started being the desire of the stories to rise above themselves.”
Dan Sinykin and Laura McGrath are launching a new permanent section at Public Books called Culture Industries, which will continue in the vein of their series “Hacking the Culture Industries.” The editors are looking for “compelling pieces on the inner-workings of any/all creative and cultural industries—music! film! TV! games! and, yes, books!! These do not need to be data-driven, but should be rigorously researched.”