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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Ford’s Frank on Thanksgiving

“Most of our students are functionally illiterate”

Not MALA students, though. Right?

"…Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By "functionally illiterate" I mean "unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers." I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of "serious adult novel." Furthermore, I've read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we're not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren't YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

I'm not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn't do it. They don't have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They're like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided..."

https://open.substack.com/pub/hilariusbookbinder/p/the-average-college-student-today?selection=06f1e586-9dbc-48df-9f81-a138b9dc4b64&r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

The Loved Ones

I read this in a secular spirit, whatever Wendell's intentions: the permanent world is this one, but inverted. As Emerson said: "there is no other world." But there are other ways to take it. And my dear departed are indeed present, ever more-so as time goes by. And I am ever less absent. I begin to inhabit what Richard Ford calls the Permanent Period.

The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-twentyfirst-century-american-fiction/75A9A01A8126F242370382DCA3E5D086

NYTimes: Readers Pick Their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

When the Book Review published a list of the 100 best books of the century, we knew we'd hear from readers who were incensed or gutted or driven wild by grief. How could So-and-So's book not make the cut?

One of the best things about working in books is just this: the passion of our constituency. No way would we deprive readers of the chance to vote for their own list and make their voices heard.

And so you have. There's some overlap between your list and ours — we agreed on 39 books. As for the 61 new entries here, what stands out most is that they're the books that captured cultural moments and sparked lively literary conversations. They're also great. Enjoy!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/reader-best-books-21st-century.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Best historical fiction set in the south

"The paradox is that, although it's obviously still quite segregated, and there is a huge suspicion on either side, these parallel worlds are tightly braided."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/best-historical-fiction-novels-set-american-south-xan-brooks/

The underfed hunger for quiet, sustained attention

David Foster Wallace on why reading feels so hard:

https://www.threads.com/@alexandbooks_/post/DQ8HxtMANJn?xmt=AQF0BPSe1nPtp36GfUST5AHrPy_AFQuRDRQFjVIxh8daHk7f8vNoXM9oJq1oiz5IpHupfSY&slof=1

Summer ‘24

"Every new novel by Cusk is a major literary event, although her experiments with form—and her unpicking of what she has previously called the "underpinnings" of narrative—are often initially received with bafflement"

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/notable-new-novels-of-summer-2024-cal-flyn/

Window or painting

"You can consider whether a novel is like a window you look through to see the people beyond on the other side, or whether the novel is like a painting you just look at."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/contemporary-fiction-robert-eaglestone/

Powers on music & mortality

"The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body."

If you love music, slake your soul on this: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/10/15/richard-powers-music/

We’re all novelists