Lit Hub Daily: May 30, 2023

• Tool or terror? Gabrielle Bellot looks to literature to better understand our relationship to artificial intelligence. | Lit Hub Tech

• Laura Tillman explores the contradictions of migrant chef Lalo Garcia: “He wasn’t the country’s most famous or influential chef, but he was the one people came to as a confidant.” | Lit Hub Food

• May’s going out with a bang with these 23 new books. | The Hub

• “Perhaps the only effective means by which to defeat the untruth is to tell a better story.” David Chrisinger considers the enduring power of Ernie Pyle’s Brave Men. | Lit Hub

• Joel Cuthbertson takes a tour through the vast, delightful oeuvre of sci-fi legend Connie Willis. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Inside the black box: Scientists are trying to figure out what books ChatGPT is being fed. | Business Insider

• “Their ultimate fear is of non-normative desire.” Elia Cugini considers the “unbearable timidity” of dark romance novels. | The Baffler

• “The books are all in my orange-grove farmhouse, in towering stacks, like a movie set for an old bookstore. I see America through fiction.” Susan Straight maps 1,001 books across America. | Los Angeles Times

• Seven Arab and Arab diasporic novels about storytellers. | Electric Lit

• Texas lawmakers have passed a bill that aims to ban all “sexually explicit books” from the state’s school libraries. | CNHI News

• Illinois has had enough with all the book bans. | The Guardian

• “You can get eaten by insects, rodents, goblins or intergalactic meatpackers. Stabbed by ghosts, lanced by knights, or executed by gangsters.” Shehan Karunatilaka on how Choose Your Own Adventure books inspired his Booker Prize-winning novel. | The Guardian

Also on Lit Hub: Amelia Possanza on the power of uncovering hidden LGBTQ lives • Jane Ciabattari talks to the author of Good Night, Irene • Read from Domenico Starnone’s newly translated novel, The House on Via Gemito (tr. Oonagh Stransky)