Lit Hub Daily: October 30, 2023

• In which Randy Sparkman talks to AI about Eudora Welty: “Acknowledging all the fears about sentience and agency, about active misuse and unintended consequences, its ability to help us create can only be transformative in result and implication.” | Lit Hub Tech

• Tim O’Brien on the glee of 2:46 a.m., what writers should be asked about more, and the books he rereads. | Lit Hub Questionnaire

• How David Cornwell, civil servant turned bored spy, became pseudonymous novelist John Le Carré. | Lit Hub Biography

• “To an extent which has not been recognized, the first book of The Iliad teems with instances of how to do things with words.” Robin Lane Fox considers the movement of Homer’s epic. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Exploring the shape-shifting science of oceans. | Lit Hub Nature

• ICYMI in hardcover: 25 new books out in paperback this month. | The Hub

• On Elizabeth Gilbert’s “neutered rhetoric of brand management” and the emptiness of literature written for the market. | Noema

• “Her writing is elegant but colloquial, characterized by an impulse to say and share things others might keep private.” On Helen Garner. | The New Yorker

• Jess Bergman talks to Dan Sinykin about his book Big Fiction and the realities of conglomerate publishing. | The Baffler

• “In these 30 years, Escobar has ceased to be just a drug trafficker and murderer and has become a media personality.” Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vázquez considers Pablo Escobar’s enduring legacy. | El País

• Artforum editor-in-chief David Velasco was fired after publishing an open letter expressing solidarity with Palestinians and supporting a ceasefire in Gaza, signed by thousands of artists and curators. | The Intercept

Also on Lit Hub: The 14 best book covers of October • AudioFile’s best audiobooks of October • Read from Pilar Quintana’s newly translated novel, Abyss (tr. Lisa Dillman)