Mark McGurl

Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era

y'all !!!!

I love that the blurbs are basically like, "listen, she is never not telling you about some bleak shit" 😍❤️‍🔥 (thank you @aarthivadde.bsky.social and @markmcgurl.bsky.social)

“What are we pretending not to know today?”
—Toni Cade Bambara

Along Came an Influencer: How America’s Bestselling Writer Became MrBeast’s Co-Author After decades atop the thriller game, James Patterson is fending off waning sales by doubling down on collaborations—and dabbling in romantasy too.

Terrific profile of James Patterson. Surprisingly affecting. Did you know he funds stipends for Iowa Writers' Workshop students? That he dropped out of a PhD in English at Vanderbilt with an MA for a fiction thesis? www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

If Christians quit the Colosseum, the lions win — so I'm staying

“ ‘The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation’ … [But] in 2024, food-at-home is no longer 33% of household spending. For most families, it’s 5 to 7 percent.”

Oh you rich conspiring pedophiles & all your smug weaselly defenders, please lecture me again about how my trans kid is a threat to American family values

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

Peter Coviello isn't on Bluesky, but this definitely should be: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Cover of my book: Literature's Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value. The Cover depicts a bookseller in 1930s Cambridge, with a book rack on her back, and a customer perusing one of her books

Thrilled to announce my new book (electronic version out now, print next month) — it proposes a new value theory grounded in the longue durée of literary institutions, 1800–present.

nobody does it like natalie shapero

I’m not depressed, I’m Kojeve-pilled. History ended, desire died, and I became a post-historical functionary sipping tea in silence. You still chase meaning; I enact formality. Fukuyama was late. I microwaved noodles at the end of time and called it Absolute Spirit.

Introduction - Post45 Rarely does the publication of a peer-reviewed essay generate the excitement that accompanied Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” in the Fall 2024 issue of ELH. Lawrence aims for an ambitious i...

What role do social movements play in recent literary history? @franciscondine.bsky.social and I gathered some brilliant scholars to debate Jeffrey Lawrence's essay, "Mobilizing Literature," published last fall for @atpost45.bsky.social

post45.org/2025/03/intr...

This issue of ALH, just released, will apparently be the last edited solely by Gordon Hutner, one of our great "professional readers" (to borrow a @harrys.bsky.social phrase).

It's hard to see the mark he's left on his field, because, in a way, it is the field.

academic.oup.com/alh/issue

Hmm. No deep thoughts. For me it’s hard to imagine that ByteDance won’t find a way to buy Trump off. I guess we’ll see!

In a time when it seems books coverage only ever shrinks, Adrienne turned Esquire into a books powerhouse. This is devastating.

"Nothing less than a reorientation of our attention to film, literature, and time." -- J. D. Connor

Coming this Spring: DOWNTIME: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN SLOW MOTION, by Mark Goble (@goblemark.bsky.social). bit.ly/4g3u7Rs @columbiaup.bsky.social