Prose off: AI fiction by future Guggenheim recipient Dan Bevacqua in The Paris Review v. Fleming fiction

Saturday 5/2/26

The truth about almost all writers--a word that all but cries out to be enclosed in quotes--right now: They're using AI to create--another one of those quote words--their work.

It doesn't matter the venue or the perceived "level" of venue or press. It's AI. The people who get the awards, who are lauded--those for whom the log always is made to roll--are producing AI work.

And it should be obvious. We'll be going through recent cases in which these talentless, lazy, mindless people have been being busted. We can focus on The New York Times by itself of late for a cornucopia of examples.

But here's where it gets a little more complicated and this is a point I want to make before we begin the latest prose off in which we take the standard, never-changing, predictable, arid dross by one of these people, and juxtapose it with the work with which there's plainly and inarguably no comparison.

For a long time now, so-called literary fiction has been AI. It's been AI, in a sense, longer than AI has been AI.

What do I mean by that? I mean it's all the same, it all reads the same. It's flat, plastic, lifeless. It drones rather than speaks. It has nothing to say. It recycles. There's nothing new, bold. You aren't immersed. Blown away.

Something like, say, a Laura van den Berg story, reads as if someone said, "Hey, ChatGPT, write a boring story for me that no one could care about that sounds like a person who comes from money, went to an Ivy League school, teaches at one, only associates with such people, married such a person, has no imagination, no range, no artistic heart or soul, and is about someone just like the author who is actually the author."

ChatGPT is pumping that out in seconds. And every "actual," as such, piece of writing by "actual" Laura van den Berg will read as if it was "written" this way.

Alternately, you could say, "Hey, ChatGPT, write me a Laura Van Den Berg story." Every one of them is the say as every other. Same cadences, same style, same voice, same shape, same characters, same flatness.

It's as if ChatGPT was writing Laura Van Den Berg stories before Laura Van Den Berg was. She just came along and applied her name.

What's the difference?

Do it with any of them. "Hey, Claude, fire me out a Tommy Orange story..."

All the writing these people do is nondescript and predictable. Every time. There's no variation. And there's never any life in any of it.

How about if you said, "ChatGPT, I want you to work with these other six AI technologies and combine your efforts to create the most New Yorker-y New Yorker story you can."

What would it read like? It'd read like the indistinguishable, bad, plastic, soulless, boring, lifeless New Yorker stories we see in so many of these prose offs.

Ultimate New Yorker story.

Why have these people do them when you could just get AI to do them?

The answer to that question takes us back to what the publishing system is really for. The publishing system exists so that the people of the system can be the people of the system.

So that Laura Van Den Berg can be Laura Van Den Berg, and Deborah Treisman can be Deborah Treisman, and David Szalay can be David Szalay, and so forth. Wendy Lesser can be the Bag of Hag, Mark Warren can be an rage-drunk (minimum), threat-issuing, unstable, nutjob, Tao Lin can rape and plagiarize, Yiyun Li can bolster her bank account and her awards pile with crocodile tears, Raluca Albu can indulge her manic tendencies and then tell Katie Raissan to do the same, Gregory Cowles can print pieces in The New York Times Book Review written by AI, Jackson Howard of FSG can discriminate at will without fear of consequence, Roxane Gay can grift and bully, Willard Spiegelman can yell at you for using his name and then turn around and ask for nude photos, and so on.

There's no other reason. It's not for you. It certainly isn't for me. It isn't for readers. It isn't for reading. It isn't for entertainment. It isn't for art. It isn't for culture. It isn't for society. It isn't for the world. It isn't so that someone has something to do for a half hour before bed.

Let me ask you this: If a story or book reads like it's AI-generated, what is the difference if it wasn't? Amounts to the same thing.

The onus is on the writer, the artist, to create something human for humans. A great artist creates a unique work that adds something unique to our lives, our understanding of our lives, our world, our worlds within the world. While thrilling us, making us feel alive, making us feel. It's so intensely connective that experience. Like that was written for you.

AI isn't just a means of production. It's a descriptor. When anyone else could do what you do, when one needn't even have a heart, a pulse, a brain, to do what you do, or a soul, then what is the point in you doing it? Why do we need you?

Which isn't to say that the dreck created by the heartless, pulseless, brainless, soulless entity is needed either.

I don't believe there is a single person out there who believes--and I know that no one has cause to believe--that any story in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, or any work by any Guggenheim winner, any MacArthur genius grant winner, any Booker Prize winner, any Pulitzer winner, couldn't just as well have been produced by AI.

There is not a single thing that anyone--including all the people who want me dead, who hate me as much as they can hate, in their barren lives of rancor and pettiness--in any work by any of the celebrated people of this system can point to, as in quote, and say, "Only a human could have produced this, and a great artist of a human at that, for these reasons..."

I challenge anyone to try. Bring it.

These people aren't interested in writing at all. They're interested in attention, special treatment, compliments. Honor and rank in this incestuous monarchy.

They don't care about readers. They don't care about the art of writing. They don't care if they do their own writing. They don't care about you, they don't care about the world. They don't care about humans, they don't care about art, they don't care about truth, beauty, empathy, ideas. Entertainment.

They just want things to come back to their name.

Do you know what I mean by that? Their name in tandem with some honor, some placement, some list, some blurb, some praise. That is all they care about--the link between their name and such a thing.

They don't about whether the reasons are legitimate, if any of it is sincere, if any of it is earned, or that it pertains to work that they didn't even create because there name is still on the cover or at the top of the page.

Think of how pathetic, how broken, how much of a writer you are not, how much of an artist you are not, for this to be who you are. There isn't anyone who's less of a writer and less of an artist than a person like this. Which is to say, someone like almost every single person calling themselves a writer and the people lauded as writers in this publishing system.

That isn't what you are.

Remember recently when I spoke of how the stakes here are things like getting a mention in the English department newsletter at the school where people like these people inculcate others in being and "thinking" and "writing" just like they do?

It's no different than feeding the AI machine. There's no creativity here, no originality. Nothing human for humans. It's grist for a different kind of AI-mill that then has overlap with the actual AI-mill.

Here we have such a newsletter from Western New England University, feting one of their own, Dan Bevacqua, for having fiction in The Paris Review that not a single person cared about or could care about, who is then interviewed and talks about, of course, being imitative, workshops, blah blah blah, in this very self-important way, when it's just a guy who sucks at writing, who can only write the same kind of writing, that the sounds the same, is the same, no matter that it's technically a different work, who was hooked up by a revolting classist who only publishes boring, shitty, soulless writing by the right kind of person, in Emily Stokes.

The way these people talk about it, though, it's like they're these magical, intrepid explorer-creators, unearthing jewels in the deepest jungles of their minds, and then having those unearthed jewels shared with the world on the basis of merit and some process of equity.

Again: It's always just someone who sucks at writing who is hooked up by a bad person who is similar to them.

That's it. There's nothing else to this. It's not complicated.

There's no process. That's all a lie. It's people who aren't good at this thing, which is obvious if anyone actually looks at the work--which virtually no one does--who are seen as the right kind of person, of money, privilege, limited intellectual and artistic capabilities, who aren't productive, and who are seen as being one of these people.

There is nothing special about them. Nothing to make an insecure, blue-blooded person who is nothing special themselves, but needs to try and think of themselves that way, feel threatened.

Let's get to this, then, with excerpts from not just one, but two stories by Dan Bevacqua in The Paris Review, as put forward by revolting classist editor Emily Stokes. Why two? Because I want you to see, in a single entry here, how he does the same thing in each story. We'll take the starts of these stories, okay? You know, that which is meant, in theory, to draw you in. Ready? This is the beginning of Bevacqua's "The House with the Mezzanine" in the spring 2026 issue of The Paris Review.

Years ago, I signed up for Dr. Stepanovich’s course on Chekhov. The class was an eclectic mix. There were undergraduate Russian lit and English majors, grad students like me from various departments, and even one precocious high school senior, who took the train down from Horace Mann. The course was straightforward. First we read the novellas, and then some of the longer stories. Finally, we started in on Chekhov’s greatest hits, among them “The Lady with the Little Dog,” “Gooseberries,” and “The House with the Mezzanine.” That last story is about a landscape painter who falls in love with two rich, beautiful sisters⁠—or he believes he’s in love with the younger, more impressionable sister, except maybe, like the plot to a screwball comedy, he’s actually in love with the older, angrier, more politically active sister. But it’s hard to tell. Does the landscape painter know which woman he loves? Do we?

“Yes!” a grad student named Staci said one afternoon. Staci had a head of thick, wavy auburn hair she liked to do up in a wild conflagration. She was powerful. I was attracted to her in the same way I’m attracted to most fierce, clever women.

“Of course he’s in love with the older sister,” Staci said. “That’s the point of the story. There’s the one sister who’s like, You’re so talented, Mr. Artist. I love your mountains. You make me want to die in childbirth. Then there’s the other sister, who’s trying to enact real political change.”

A girl up front raised her hand and asked what a zemstvo was.

“A provincial council with powers of local government,” Dr. Stepanovich said, reminding us she was in charge. Dr. Stepanovich wore long, flowy dresses and bright scarves. She wasn’t Russian⁠—her husband was Russian, a surgeon, she’d told us⁠—and yet she had built her entire life and career around that country’s art, literature, history, and politics.

“His revelation at the end is a delusion,” Staci said. She sat in the back. To look at her, I had to crane my neck. “What a tidy way of thinking. I love the little girl! She’s being kept from me! Oh, my heart! I guess I’ll go back to painting the countryside or whatever. It’s a living. He avoids any sort of confrontation with himself.”

We're not even a sentence into the story before we're getting the literature references. These people have no imagination. They can't invent anything. This guy, an English professor, is just going to do English professor fiction. The main character is always them. These bland, substance-devoid academics.

Who is this for? People like that? Why is it even for them? So they can just, what, recognize that they are also that way?

That's not a reading experience. That's just trainspotting. For pathetic people. That sustains you? How does that sustain you for five minutes?

A work of art is supposed to last with you for your life.

Do you think this does? For anyone? How could it?

And of course we get the grad student, etc.

It's just you, brother. It's just your linty little world in your own bellybutton.

Even if everyone in the world read, no one would care. It's impossible to care about this writing and the writing by these people.

AI couldn't do this? Why should I think AI didn't do this?

This writing sounds artificial. Awkward. Like someone who isn't cool trying to impress others they think are cool. It rings hollow. And...off. Clang-y. Note the absence of dimensionality. Texture.

And maybe come up with your own title, Professor AI, instead of just copping Chekhov's. You lazy, lying, MFA-machined, AI-driven clone.

So we've seen that excerpt, now let's look at another. You'll find this remarkable if you're new here. And I need to be clear and state that I can do this with every last one of these lauded and hooked up system people. Every last Guggenheim winner. And believe me, this guy will have a Guggenheim before too long. We're going to look at the start of another story by the same person, and you'll have no reason to think it's a different story on the one hand, and that this isn't AI on the other.

This is the beginning of Bevacqua's "Daughters," also put forward by revolting classist Emily Stokes, in the spring 2024 issue of The Paris Review, what had prompted the taint-tonguing puff feature in the college newsletter with this joker talking about himself and this world as so very super duper special and legitimate and meritorious and learned and magical and those treasures of the deep forest of verdant talent, etc., etc., etc.

It's the same fucking thing. It's the same AI writing. And it's just this guy. Brother, it's you. There's nothing here but you. The cardboard entity that is you. You've invented nothing. You've given nothing. You offer nothing. You don't have anything for anyone.

Graduate students, writers, academia, blah blah blah. A zombie possesses more of a soul with which to write than these people.

You are terrible at this, sir. And when you have another story in The Paris Review, or The New Yorker, or whatever the case may be, it'll also be just like this. When you get your Guggenheim and your next book after that comes out and is on all the "Best of the season" lists and with all the gushy reviews of stock adjectives applied without any sincerity as if written before the book was even printed, the work in that book will be just like this work. You've never gotten anything because anyone was impressed by the work, moved by the work. And you never will. That'll never be the real reason. It'll never have anything to do with it.

These stories aren't in The Paris Review because they're good, you think they're good, anyone thinks they're good, Emily Stokes thinks they're good, the agent thinks they're good. No one honestly believes that because it isn't anything that can be honestly thought. The words on the page, the work, doesn't allow for that.

If you read a bit further in that "story," the third person narrator starts talking about Faulkner and As I Lay Dying, because of course. Of course of course of course. It's even more clownish when it's a third person narrator doing this. Inept. This isn't how writing works. It's certainly not how the art of writing works.

In a way, I'm just saying what this guy knows about himself. These people always know on some level. That's a huge part of the problem for me, because I make them feel that all the more, and it isn't like they're going to punish themselves now for that, is it?

Let's wrap this up the way all of these get wrapped up, with an excerpt from a work that these people, and Emily Stokes, the whole lot of them, know is on a completely different level by the person who isn't like any of them. It's also the beginning of a story, just to keep things nice and consistent here. Ready?

I bought this type of subscription that wasn’t what it was supposed to be, which isn’t a matter of opinion or me being a presumptuous asshole. It’s the kind of thing everyone knows the deal about including even the people who have to call their middle-aged kid whenever their computer freezes because they can’t remember what to do since the last time.

And that’s before we get to the no-doubter of a profile photo this woman used which is sufficient to make you imagine a highly approving cartoon eagle saying, “Now that’s spread!” in a thought bubble.

But when you paid the $9.99 monthly fee and got full access to her page, you discovered the videos were only of her sitting in her car. Clothed. Bundled up, depending on the season. An “I’m-dressed-and-this-is-what-you’re-getting” version of a bait-and-switch.

The skin you saw was her face and hands. What you think of as the everyday parts. Her hair stood out as much as anything. It was short but like it hadn’t been short for long and a friend would be surprised after not seeing her for a while.          

Usually she’s drinking a coffee as though nothing’s of greater importance in the world, this beam of light in a Starbucks cup for the darkened path that she’s had to go down.

She takes the first sip and then she’ll say something like, “I really needed this today so bad” or “This is my little treat I got myself,” and sort of laugh uncomfortably like she’s embarrassed this drink means so much to her. It’s one of those laughs that could change before it’s gotten over the lips into someone starting to cry instead, and when you realized that wasn’t laughter but tears you’d be like, “Wait, what’s going on here?”

Once she’s taken the sip and laughed without quite getting to crying and gone back to picking at the plastic wrapping of her ChapStick and has kind of settled into herself, she begins talking in these life lessons from wherever it is she’s parked her car about seeing the good in people and how you really do reap what you sow.

The first time I heard that—and she says it a lot—I thought there’s no way she wouldn’t spell sow like sewing the activity with the needle and thread, which wouldn’t have bothered me as much if she was doing what she was supposed to be doing instead of making like she was a worker at the fortune cookie factory who’d gotten her big chance to write the messages.

The setting for her videos is always the same, an outpost of a parking lot overhung with branches throwing these knobby, finger-shaped shadows on the windshield, knuckles busted too many times over to ever heal right. No middle-aged housewives passing through the background the same as they pass through their lives, chirping into phones about the latest batch of kids’ birthday parties while heading to Target for the third time that week. More like somewhere life itself would go if it could for a quick break from constantly having to happen. 

There’s a hint of light in the sky by the time she gets there—same hint, regardless of the season—but you know it’s going fast. She has these older videos on her page from when it was warmer with the window open and I was pretty sure I could hear running water, but not a huge amount, call it a babbling brook long on spirit and short on content.

That right there is by the only writer who can't be replaced by AI. That's the last writer. Or the first depending on what might happen. Nothing else could come up with that, sound like that, replicate that. It could come from no thing, no app, no software, no other person. Just one artist. And these people won't let you see it, because it isn't by one of them and it couldn't be done by any of them or the software they use.