Coming to MTSU, Spring ‘26–

MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) 6050-Philosophy in Recent American Fiction

(For more info: phil.oliver@mtsu.edu... https://prafmtsu.blogspot.com/)

We'll all read three novels* together, and each of us will additionally read and report on either a fourth novel or on a specific author's life and works.** 

"Philosophy" = searching for wisdom, clarity, enlightenment, meaning, perspective, purpose, reality, truth, understanding, ... especially with regard to the human impact on nature, the environment, other species, & other humans.

"Recent" = 21st century

*The three novels:

1. Richard Ford, Be Mine

2. Richard Powers, Playground (see below #) 

3. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Argyments for the Existence of God

**Possible fourth choices, for individual reports: 

• The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015) - A satirical look at race and identity that won the Man Booker Prize.

• The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (2022) - Explores themes of memory, connection, and digital surveillance. 

• Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (2024) - Considers whether the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past. 

• Any of the earlier Frank Bascombe novels by Richard Ford...

• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016) - Explores the lasting impacts of slavery and the search for identity across generations.

• Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2012) - Explores climate change, ecological disruption, and human responsibility. 

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2024) - a new take on Dickens' Copperfield.

• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) - A harrowing journey through a post-apocalyptic landscape, meditating on survival, love, and morality.

• A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet (2020) - Set in a near-apocalyptic world, it examines generational responsibility and environmental collapse.

• Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (2022) - Dystopian fiction about cultural repression and familial bonds.

• The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) - A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel weaving interrelated stories about trees, nature, and activism. 

• Bewilderment by Richard Powers (2021) - This novel delves deeply into themes of ecological awareness and the human condition through the story of a father and his neurodivergent son.

• Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (2019) - Investigates issues of race, privilege, and morality in contemporary America.

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (2022) - This narrative explores human creativity and relationships within the context of gaming and artificial intelligence.

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004) - A profound exploration of faith, mortality, and legacy in small-town America.

• Plato at the Googleplex by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein...

• The Maytrees by Annie Dillard (2007 meditates on time, love, and mortality in a manner reminiscent of late James or even Santayana.

• A Children’s Bible (2020) and Dinosaurs (2022) by Lydia Millet, perhaps our sharpest living ecological moralist. She writes with a mix of irony and tenderness about apocalypse, indifference, and human responsibility to the more-than-human world.
• The Woman Upstairs (2013), The Emperor’s Children (2006) by Claire Messud.
  Messud’s work probes questions of authenticity, ambition, and moral compromise—what Sartre called mauvaise foi in a modern American key.
• The Flamethrowers (2013), The Mars Room (2018) by Rachel Kushner
  Both novels interrogate freedom, rebellion, and moral responsibility within systems of art, politics, and incarceration.
• Fates and Furies (2015), Matrix (2021) by Lauren Groff
  Matrix, in particular, is a striking meditation on creative power, spirituality, and women’s community—an existential study of agency within constraint. Medieval monastic life reimagined as a feminist parable of creation, solitude, and visionary leadership. Philosophical focus: Meliorism, the work of care, and the imagination of better worlds within the constraints of necessity — what it means to “find delight in dark times.”
• The History of Love (2005), Forest Dark (2017) by Nicole Krauss
  Krauss brings a metaphysical sensibility to questions of love, art, and transcendence—often through a quasi-Kabbalistic lens.
• Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009) by Margaret Atwood 
• The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza
• Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

**Possible authors,  for individual reports:

• Michael Chabon

• Jennifer Egan

• Richard Ford

• Jonathan Franzen

• Barbara Kingsolver

• Rachel Kushner

• Ann Patchett

• Richard Powers

• Marilyn Robinson

• Philip Roth

• Tom Piazza

• Your suggestions...

I asked ChatGPT to draft a story combining the voices and themes of Richard Ford and Richard Powers, narrated by Frank Bascombe…

Culpability

Set at a summer rental on the Chesapeake Bay, a riveting family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence, from the bestselling author of the “wise and addictive” (New York Times) The Gifted School.

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret that implicates them in the accident.

During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI.

Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative. g'r

The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza

This is delightful. And so is Tom's latest book about his friendship with John Prine, late  in John's life. Met him at the southern festival of books this past October. 

It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers' Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63920580-the-auburn-conference

 

The best fiction audiobooks of 2025

Selected by the editors at @audiofilemagazine, who reviewed 2000+ audiobooks this year.

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/the-best-fiction-audiobooks-of-2025-audiofile-editors/

America - hope we find it!

 

"Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together"
"I've got some real estate here in my bag"
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America

"Kathy, " I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said, "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost, " I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Paul Simon
America lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

A better American dream

If there is an America on the other side of this, it will have to be a different country, a better one, based not on the restoration of hopes that people my age once had, but on a broader sense of the future, a better American dream…
Timothy Snyder

https://www.threads.com/@thetimothysnyder/post/DRqA1GLEr34?xmt=AQF0wuoS99qC1fBBb4P4qseWehZtehP0KB63sCbHIByzDCJBopXW9QXYFzbeaC46YBEEoV4P&slof=1

I asked ChatGPT what to read next, after Ford and Powers…

…contemporary American writers who are working the same fault lines — mortality, technology, tenderness, disillusionment, moral responsibility, grace under pressure — but each in their own register.

---

If you're coming off Richard Powers' Playground

Powers is playing the long game of consciousness, intelligence, agency, responsibility — all with that mix of lyric wonder and cold technological dread. Here are contemporary American writers who stand in that same wind.

1. Ted Chiang — Exhalation

Precise, humane, skeptical, and quietly luminous. Chiang circles the same big questions: what counts as mind, what counts as experience, and how fragile our moral frameworks become when we build thinking systems. A perfect philosophical counterpoint to Playground.

2. Karen Joy Fowler — We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Not about AI, but absolutely about intelligence, empathy, otherness, and the moral knots Powers loves. It's smart, daring, and emotionally devastating in the same "so what does this say about us?" way.

3. Colson Whitehead — The Intuitionist and The Nickel Boys

Whitehead shares Powers' appetite for big conceptual frameworks blended with moral inquiry. The Intuitionist is more speculative; Nickel Boys is stark realism, but both probe systems and souls with Powers-like intensity.

4. Jeff VanderMeer — Hummingbird Salamander

Eco-terror, surveillance, intelligence (human and non-human), and the sense that the future is collapsing into us. VanderMeer is more surreal than Powers, but they share a prophetic tone.

5. Lydia Millet — A Children's Bible and Dinosaurs

Millet is one of the quiet powerhouses of contemporary American fiction: ecological consciousness, moral bewilderment, and a strange, steady hope. A Children's Bible especially echoes Powers' urgency.

6. Don DeLillo — Zero K

DeLillo stripped to the bone. Mortality, technology, the human impulse to transcend limits. Stoic, cold, philosophical — very much in Powers' orbit.

7. Kim Stanley Robinson — The Ministry for the Future

Nonfiction in spirit, fiction in form. Clear-eyed, forward-thinking, ethically driven. Robinson has the same "wake up; time is short" energy, but channeled through global systems rather than intimate relationships.

---

If you're coming off Richard Ford's Be Mine

Be Mine is late-style Ford: mortality, regret, tenderness, the lurch of fatherhood, the humor that barely keeps us from breaking. If you want contemporary American voices who can hit those same human notes without sentimentality, here they are.

1. Kent Haruf — Our Souls at Night

Spare, honest, unsugared. Haruf writes with a Ford-like respect for ordinary lives, aging bodies, and the long shadow of past choices.

2. Elizabeth Strout — Olive, Again and Lucy by the Sea

Strout is as clear-eyed and unsentimental as Ford, with the same mixture of rue, wisdom, and earned tenderness. She may be the closest living cousin to Ford's emotional register.

3. Andre Dubus III — Townie and Gone So Long

Dubus carries grief, fatherhood, violence, and compassion with the same raw directness. He writes the ache of American life with almost Fordian clarity.

4. Stewart O'Nan — Emily, Alone and Wish You Were Here

O'Nan is criminally under-read: domestic life, aging, family, loss — all handled with patient, unsentimental grace. He has Ford's attentiveness but less irony.

5. Ann Patchett — The Dutch House and Tom Lake

Patchett writes about family, aging, and forgiveness with a quiet moral intelligence. Tom Lake in particular has the same elegiac warmth as parts of Be Mine.

6. Jonathan Franzen — Crossroads

Franzen can be prickly, but he's wrestling with the same American tensions Ford has always confronted: duty, self-delusion, yearning, the bruises family leaves behind.

7. Marilynne Robinson — Home and Lila

Not Ford's tone, but Ford's depth. Robinson writes aging, regret, fatherhood, and grace with a steady, luminous seriousness that pairs beautifully with Ford's long walk through American loneliness.

8. Ron Rash — The Caretaker

Grief, responsibility, rural America, moral ambiguity — Rash's sensibility often feels like Ford's distilled through Appalachian clarity.

---

If you want one from each list — the closest kin to Powers and to Ford

Closest to Powers:

Ted Chiang, Exhalation.

Lean, precise, humane, and philosophically bracing.

Closest to Ford:

Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea,

or

Stewart O'Nan, Emily, Alone.

Both are honest, unsparing, and tender in the way Ford, at his best, has always been.