Overview

What do Americans truly want in a novel? What would it look like if their preferences and aversions materialized in book form? In People's Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has taken up this challenge, writing two groundbreaking novels based on a nationwide poll about literary taste-one featuring the story elements Americans most desire and another containing everything Americans despise. The Most Wanted Novel is a fast-paced thriller evoking page-turners by Dan Brown, David Baldacci, and Janet Evanovich. It follows a California woman pulled into a tech tycoon's apocalyptic ambitions after her brother's kidnapping, teaming up with a hunky FBI agent with a tragic past. The Most Unwanted Novel is a genre-bending doorstopper: an epistolary Christmas novel set on a near-future Mars, where elderly aristocratic tennis players scour the globe for lost love, venturing from the coldest of arctic wastelands to the darkest caverns of the macabre. Variously recalling Kathy Acker, César Aira, and Philip K. Dick, it features sentient robots, talking animals, and a hundred-page collection of horror stories. People's Choice Literature is inspired by the artists Komar and Melamid, who created two now-infamous paintings based on opinion polling. A similar experiment by Dave Soldier produced ""The Most Wanted Song"" and ""The Most Unwanted Song."" Comitta has adapted these methods to fiction, drawing on readers' preferences about everything from genre to verb tense to characters' identity, and incorporating machine learning data and passages written in collaboration with a large language model. Audacious and shockingly entertaining, People's Choice Literature also asks big questions about taste, authorship, and the notion of ""good writing.""

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Reviews

People’s Choice Literature is an unusual and brilliant book. In one respect, one entire novel consists of nothing but 'weaknesses' (paradoxically, for this reader, it is the more entertaining and valuable of the two). The other novel consists of nothing but dubious ‘strengths.' Twinned together, they complete one another, offering a truly unique and unrepeatable form of critical and practical 'cultural intervention.' -- Jonathan Lethem, author of <i>Brooklyn Crime Novel</i> Tom Comitta's book is both a conceptual experiment and literary achievement. Poking fun at the notion of data-driven insight while exploiting data toward truly creative ends, this diptych of the ""most wanted"" and ""most unwanted"" books contains two fantastic novels—which you'll love to hate and hate to love. Comitta revives fundamental questions about art for the age of big data and mass publishing: Who makes culture and who consumes it? What is the role of populism in art? Clever, relevant, and very funny, People's Choice Literature does more than entertain—it questions the rules of entertainment itself. -- Elvia Wilk, author of <i>Death by Landscape</i> Tom Comitta is a master of literary constraint. Combining the rules-based writing of Oulipo with the highly structured practice of opinion polling, Comitta reveals the absurdity of modern culture’s obsession with tracking taste. People’s Choice Literature takes literature-by-the-numbers to its logical extreme to give readers what they want (and don’t want) in surprisingly new forms. Danielle Steel reimagined as Gertrude Stein with a Lifetime subscription – need I say more! -- Aarthi Vadde, E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English, Duke University Tom Comitta is heir, simultaneously, to Laurence Sterne, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Kathy Acker, and in People’s Choice Literature they have written the novel(s) as well as the novel theory that we need for our current age of public opinion polling, platform capitalism, and large language models. I don’t know whether The Most Wanted Novel and The Most Unwanted Novel are so bad they’re good, or so good they’re bad, and by the end I couldn’t even tell you which is which, but I do know that together these books form a pitch perfect, exuberantly creative response to the contemporary rise of uncreative writing. -- Deidre Lynch, Harvard University

Author Information

Tom Comitta is the author of two novels, The Nature Book and Patchwork. Their short fiction and essays have appeared in Wired, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Bomb.

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