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Dec 11, 2025
The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT writing program has produced yet another round of AI art debates, with almost everyone either fearfully predicting or hopefully...
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Nov 28, 2025
Recently, a rather silly Substack article prompted people in my internet circles to debate philosophy. The article, from Bentham’s Bulldog, was a rehash of old analytic...
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Nov 7, 2025
I often publish interviews with authors here at Counter Craft but I’ve been meaning to expand the series to talk to other agents, editors, and others in the...
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Oct 22, 2025
The Ten Year Affair began life as a short story. It can be tricky to expand a narrative from a few pages to a few hundred pages, and you pull it off here. Can you talk about...
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Oct 9, 2025
This October, like many Octobers, I reread Shirley Jackson’s haunted house masterpiece The Haunting of Hill House. That it isn’t my absolute favorite Shirley...
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Sep 26, 2025
Style has become a dirty word in many literary circles. To care about style is “pretentious” and “snobbish” and anyway the goal of fiction is to have the...
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Sep 11, 2025
Last week, I wrote about “Criticism in the Age of AI” and tried to end on an optimistic note about arts criticism in general and book coverage specifically. This week,...
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Aug 20, 2025
My last article, “Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop,” was a rant slash cri de coeur about avoiding all the noise and focusing on your art. It...
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Aug 13, 2025
Recently, a reader restacked my “Art in the Age of Slop” article about making art in an age dominated by both human and AI-generated slop. They expressed the feeling that...
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Aug 6, 2025
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, then you know I’m a sucker for inventive structures and forms. So, my ears perked up when I heard Benjamin Percy was going...
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Jun 4, 2025
Recently, I’ve seen a lot of chatter about what the increased attention to Substack means for the platform and especially what it means for Substack vis-a-vis traditional...
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May 28, 2025
I’m not someone constitutionally inclined to side with “gatekeepers.” Nearly all the work I love—from DIY punk band and underground hip-hop to translated...
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May 21, 2025
Over the weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times—a storied and award-winning newspaper and longtime home of Roger Ebert—published a summer reading list. Almost all the books...
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Apr 30, 2025
Recently, I read a dark and little collection of (very short) stories called I Don’t Care by the Hungarian author Ágota Kristóf. These...
Dec 11, 2025The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT writing program has produced yet another round of AI art debates, with almost everyone either fearfully predicting or hopefully...
Nov 28, 2025Recently, a rather silly Substack article prompted people in my internet circles to debate philosophy. The article, from Bentham’s Bulldog, was a rehash of old analytic...
Nov 7, 2025I often publish interviews with authors here at Counter Craft but I’ve been meaning to expand the series to talk to other agents, editors, and others in the...
Oct 22, 2025The Ten Year Affair began life as a short story. It can be tricky to expand a narrative from a few pages to a few hundred pages, and you pull it off here. Can you talk about...
Sep 26, 2025Style has become a dirty word in many literary circles. To care about style is “pretentious” and “snobbish” and anyway the goal of fiction is to have the...
Aug 20, 2025My last article, “Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop,” was a rant slash cri de coeur about avoiding all the noise and focusing on your art. It...
Aug 6, 2025If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, then you know I’m a sucker for inventive structures and forms. So, my ears perked up when I heard Benjamin Percy was going...
May 28, 2025I’m not someone constitutionally inclined to side with “gatekeepers.” Nearly all the work I love—from DIY punk band and underground hip-hop to translated...
May 21, 2025Over the weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times—a storied and award-winning newspaper and longtime home of Roger Ebert—published a summer reading list. Almost all the books...
Apr 30, 2025Recently, I read a dark and little collection of (very short) stories called I Don’t Care by the Hungarian author Ágota Kristóf. These...