So this is what happens a decade after you fire all of the copyeditors and then swirl AI into the mix. According to NPR:
Some newspapers around the country, including the Chicago Sun-Times and at least one edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer have published a syndicated summer book list that includes made-up books by famous authors.
Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende never wrote a book called Tidewater Dreams, described in the “Summer reading list for 2025” as the author’s “first climate fiction novel.”
A colorful illustration of a person laying in a tent in the woods on a summer evening. The tent is a book. There are flowers all around, a campfire, and a crescent moon and stars in the sky.
Books We Love
17 new books our critics can’t wait to read this summer
Percival Everett, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, never wrote a book called The Rainmakers, supposedly set in a “near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity.”
Only five of the 15 titles on the list are real.
On the surface of things, this is a big fat condemnation of AI. In real life though, is it? Does anyone really think that AI is supposed to do all of the heavy lifting. I mean, I never got the memo that it was supposed to do all of the work for us: maybe just help with some of the odious stuff.
So, okay: maybe this Chicago Sun-Times summer reading debacle is not quite the catastrophe we’ve been reading it as. Maybe it’s a call to wake up, rather than a call to arms.
Long story short, don’t go looking for a book by Isabel Allende called Tidewater Dreams, “described in the ‘Summer reading list for 2025’ as the author’s ‘first climate fiction novel.'” BUT, if you want to feel some of the energy that is the incomparable Allende’s actual magnificence, check out January Magazine‘s 2001 interview with the author here. (That was us. Doing the heavy lifting. Way back when.)
Oh and, for the record? If Percival Everett ever does write that Rainmakers book, I’m in from the beginning to read he wrote. ◊
On a somewhat related note, one of our sister publications, the Smartypants Technology Report, has recently been tackling issues of AI in their own way. You can check out their discoveries here.
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