Prose off, snake ball edition: Three examples of AI-ed fiction in One Story put forward by discriminatory, low-to-the-ground varmint Patrick Ryan v. Fleming story

Thursday 5/14/26

Do you know what a snake ball is? Perhaps you've seen one on a hike or in some nature video. It's what it sounds like: A big old ball of snakes writhing together under some ledge or within a hollow of rocks. Very in keeping with the connected people and the powers that be of publishing. The human (for lack of a better term) version of a snake ball.

A challenge when you write about and expose some of these people is that you're rarely just writing about one of them. The snakes are interconnected. That's how a snake ball works. If you're going to write about John Freeman, for instance, someone as disgusting as it gets in this system, you're writing about all of these other people. It can feel endlessly connected, because that's not really too far off.

We're going to keep this entry relatively straightforward. The editor of One Story is Patrick Ryan, good buddy of John Freeman. They once worked together for Sigrid Rausing at Granta. We've seen what a wonderful person she is time and time again.

It goes without saying that you are one shit ball within the snake ball if Sigrid Rausing is the kind of person who thinks you're worthy of interacting with the likes of her, never mind running her prestigious literary journal with its obviously terrible fiction (Motorollah!).

One Story publishes a single story each issue. Has to be at least 3000 words long. Once an author has been published by One Story, they can't be again. One and done.

This is the venue that--and I'm not making this up--hosts what it calls a Literary Debutante Ball in Brooklyn each year. Sounds like satire, right? It isn't. They have a ball for people who come from the right families, were born into money, can't write, haven't a lick of talent, and they fete them at this event, sending them, as officially as they can, out into the literary world as an accepted member of the system.

How gross is that? How disgustingly out of touch? Then, those people have their work appear in the other places--Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and so on.

Can you believe something like this exists? Really, though, it's how everything in the publishing industry is, or near about. Certainly at the "top" level. The prestige level. The swanky venue level. The Guggenheim level. The Best American Short Stories level. The MacArthur genius grant level. The Pulitzer level. The shortlist level. The nomination level. The let's-hype-this-fellow-fraud-of-ours level.

These geniuses are so out of touch, and just so plain dumb, and entitled, that they don't even understand that a debutante isn't some admirable thing to be. It isn't hard to think of people like this happily owning slaves if they could. And if they could leverage that into some manufactured class system exclusivity that they could use to think they're elite? Well, hellzapoppin'.

I sent Patrick Ryan works for years. Works that were infinitely better than anything he'd run. It didn't matter. I wasn't the right kind of person for one thing, and the work was that much better, for another. The former is very bad, and makes anything a no-go. You have to be one of them, or have them be able to see you as such. And the latter is the worst thing possible for people like this. You destroy their illusions, the flimsy pretexts on which their entire lives and sense of self--again, for lack of a better word--are built.

Remember the recent prose off with the famous ending of James Joyce's "The Dead" versus that bit of mine from "Dead Thomas"? There it is, right? That isn't George Saunders v. Colin Fleming, or Tommy Orange v. Colin Fleming. Or any of these suck-bag stars of their precious system of incestuous evil. That was James Joyce. And over those years, everything I offered Patrick Ryan was at that level. Because that's what I do.

And the only way that matters with a discriminatory, pathetic classist like this--best buds with John Freeman, pals with Sigrid Rausing--is poorly. You need to suck as a writer, suck as a person, and be like Patrick Ryan, who has both of those things amply covered himself.

Anyone who is then brought on an editor at One Story--like Will Allison--will be a Patrick Ryan stooge. They'll ape a Ryan, assume their attitudes, their "thinking." They'll discriminate against the same person a Ryan does, either because they're told to or they'll realize that's what is expected of them. They're soulless, mindless, heartless. Void people. Lickspittles. And the leaders are lickspittles, too. That's their warped DNA. Comes with the inbreeding.

What I've noticed since I began doing these prose offs--which, let's be honest, are merciless beat downs of undeniable truths exposing the lack of ability and integrity throughout the so-called upper echelons of this system, though the rancidness extends all the way down the tree and poisons the earth below--is that these venues have scaled back what they'll make available online.

I mean, if James Joyce isn't going to fare well in a prose off, would you want to expose yourself or the work in your hoity-toity venue of what's really shitty writing to one of them? People trying to fake it don't want a level playing field, competition. A chance for truth to permeate and blow up the carefully managed lie.

A lie, in this case, that's helped along by these people having helped kill off reading as something anyone might wish to do, which protects them, because there's no one to say, "Hey, what gives here? What is this? What's going on? That blows. Why is that in there? Seriously? Why did that person get that book deal? This won the Pulitzer?" And so forth.

You don't want to give me stuff to use if you're one of these debutantes/dilettantes. But there's always a way to be found.

We're going to take what's been made available on the One Story website from the last three stories they've published. So, this will be a three-against-one prose off. Which you know, and I know, and Patrick Ryan and company know, isn't going to matter. The pasting will be the same.

This is useful, though, in that we can see, triptych-style, the blahness, the lifelessness, the plasticity, the flatness, the nothingness, of fiction that is plainly AI-composed in these One Story examples. And if it's not technically AI-composed, what's the difference? Why would you think that a human wrote any of this, never mind a human of talent who worked dedicatingly at producing something meaningful?

If we can ask that question without having a good answer for it, then you might as well say this is AI. There's no fundamental difference, output-wise.

Let's ask another basic question: if something is great writing, shouldn't the language be...interesting? The actual language. The sentences, the words thereof. The language should have special qualities, no? Rhythms, flourishes, turns of phrase, a verbal depth. It should be memorable, right? It shouldn't be something that anyone else, pretty much, could do.

Because then it's what? How is anything great if nothing makes it great and anyone could come along and do it with ease?

These three examples that you're about to see clearly aren't great in the slightest. You won't think you couldn't write that well. You won't think anyone else couldn't have done it.

So then it's just picking the right kind of person, with the right blue blood. What does that remind you of? Having the right kind of blood, be it literal or metaphorical? This is just the caste system version. The classist version. The debutante/dilettante version.

Let's get this snaky threesome started. This is from Kristopher Jansma's "The Jejune Cruise," as put forward in One Story by Patrick Ryan, who totally honestly believes--sure--this is better than any fiction I could ever write:

I sip warm, white wine on the Mariner Deck of the thousand-foot vessel, Cosmos. I sip one hundred and fifty feet above serene seas. I sip beside nine hundred sagging senior citizens and eight hundred dashing deckhands in white uniforms. I sip from a novelty glass, etched with the words “Wonderland Cruises.” I sip and try not to remember that below the surface are approximately eleven thousand feet of solid, black water and that if I fell overboard, it would probably take my corpse an entire week to sink to the bottom. I sip and I think about how Kareem will absolve himself of all blame like he always does. I sip and think about the weight of all the water pressing me flatter and flatter.

"Jejune." Do you know what that word means? Without context. Without a writer or speaker offering any. Just hanging it out there, naked? You want to know why it's in the title? Because this talentless, insecure writer wants to establish, early on, that they're better than you.

This person isn't better than spit on the sidewalk (remember: people like Patrick Ryan only put you forward if they deem you to be like them, and what they are isn't a good person), and they're a worse writer, because at least spit can kind of look like something amoeba-style, and maybe you go, oh, it resembles a bubbly tear or some such, which is more artful than this.

How shocked are you that Jansma has had work in Best American Short Stories and has had fiction selected by our buddy Sy Safransky for inclusion in The Sun?

What does that writing remind you of? That of a rank beginner, right? Isn't that how someone writing their very first story, you know, taking a stab at it because that was the assignment, would sound?

You don't think that's AI written? You think that required a human? Does it read that way to you? You think it required a brilliant human? A great human writer?

That's AI. Why on earth would anyone think it isn't? 'Cause? Is that the reason? 'Cause? Word of honor? Swear on your mother's grave?

Nah, man. I need to see it in the fucking work. And I don't see shit in this work that doesn't scream AI.

I'm sure the next example will be totally different. Aren't you? I'm just going in order here. Three most recent stories from the One Story website. Remember, by the way: these are the only excerpts you get. They are, in theory, meant to make you say, "Yes! I will totally pay money for the great pleasure of reading more of that!" In other words, this is what Patrick Ryan thinks is the catchiest stuff to sway you.

Here we go with One Story story number two, which is by Marie Kuznetsova and called, "Hold Me Looser, Tiny Dancer." Ready?

Most academics know that summer can be a financially challenging time. When this past summer yawned out before me, I considered the usual solutions: teaching several simultaneous online courses, applying for research funding, engaging in private tutoring, grading standardized test exams, or even donating blood, plasma, or my non-vital organs. Or I could pick up a shift or two at the bookstore or a local restaurant, or even drive for Uber, now that my daughter was a teenager and no longer littered the base of my car with Goldfish and graham cracker residue. I considered these reasonable solutions, as I did at the start of every summer, but this year, the most glaringly obvious answer appeared just after classes ended. Why didn’t I see it before? Instead of engaging in these money-grubbing humiliations, I could monetize the time machine in my basement.

Gee, what do you know: academics! Wondered how long before we got to some of those. Spot those trains! Spot those trains! Spot those trains! And then, if you're an academic, you can say, "I'm an academic, I'm very important, actually, I went to Yale, if you don't recall from me having said that to you a dozen times this week."

This isn't a reason to read. It isn't a reason to do anything.

When people don't have any writing ability, you'll see them try and do these moves that you have to laugh at. It's like straining to defecate. Big push! You see it with Wells Tower, for instance. He'll write that someone "wanded a pen" rather than waved it.

They're trying to fool you and save themselves from being seen as what they really are: people with no skill to do this thing they're doing, and often being lauded by people like them for doing, who are no different in the doing of that thing than anyone else--the proverbial man on the street--would be, save that there's a chance said man on the street would be better at keeping it real. You might get something honest from him.

The "wanded" variant here is "When this past summer yawned out of me..." It's forced. Rings false. Again, it's the pre-shit strain. It's the move. It's fake. Anything like that will read awkwardly. Like when an unfunny person desperate to be funny tries to make this wild joke. Everyone looks away, pretending it didn't happen. Awkward.

How shocked are you, then, that Kuznetsova's work has been put forward by Wendy "The Bag of Hag" Lesser in Threepenny Review, Speer Morgan in The Missouri Review, Guernica which employed the post-human mucus clump that is Joel Whitney, and soaked-through system person Meghan O'Rourke of Yale Review?

We're doing a prose off here, obviously, but you could have one dandy of a connected off between the likes of a Meghan O'Rourke and a Laura Van Den Berg.

This shit is inevitable. It's how it works, and it's the only way it works. As of right now.

We're almost done here. Believe me, I get it--looking at this stuff isn't fun. This our final One Story example for now, from the the most recent story they've published, called "Secret" by Cay Kim.

I was thirteen and living in the southeastern countryside of Korea, on a hill along the coast where the people were first to receive sunlight and start a day’s work. Our town had no tourists, barely enough children to maintain a school. There were twenty kids in my middle school and seven in my grade. To kill time in the afternoons we went to the back mountains. The paths we trudged through were either dangerously thick with trees or so bare that there were no scraps to invent any play. But growing up watching our fathers tilling soil, their finger veins bruised from molding chicken wire to keep out wolves and wild boars, we understood that only at the end of extreme hard work could come reward. Watching them, we applied our imaginations, and the effort required to pretend to be animals, nymphs, or wise and somber kings from past dynasties, made our play feel even more worthwhile.

And in keeping with the "Whoa, I'm shocked!" theme, I'll have you note that Kim's work has been published by Granta and that her first novel is coming in 2026, and doubtless already has its place waiting for it on various year-end Best of Lists and the like because, again, this is how it works, and nothing here has anything to do with the quality of the work, because obviously this work isn't anything special.

We know that. I'm not going to get any pushback. What could you say? Even if you're as one of these people as person can be and you want me dead would gleefully elect to have me boiled alive if possible, what defense could you muster? Speaking about the actual work, I mean. "Screw you, philistine! It's amazing because of..."

If it could be done, don't you think it would have by now? Like, a long time ago? Many years ago? You know how many times that's happened? That would be zero. Not even anonymously. (Or what someone would hope is anonymously.)

We all know the answers to the questions asked in these prose offs. Whether you're one of these people or the opposite or somewhere in the middle.

And why should I think this isn't AI? Again, why would I ever? Why would anyone? If AI could do it, there's no reason for it to be where it is, touted as outstanding literature. Unless, what? It's a fait accompli that you can't tell the difference between AI writing and human writing no matter what human is doing the writing so it's then just some "at least a human tried" participation trophy? And, in this case, for debutantes/dilettantes?

Fuck that. There may only be one writer left who doesn't just create work that only a human could create, but only precisely that human in the history of the world, the past, the now, and the future, but he's here, and people like Patrick Ryan would never let you see his work if they had a choice in the matter.

Yesterday's letter mentioned a story of mine that I'm working on called "You're Probably Just Tired" as the real national anthem for this country here in 2026, which simply happens to be a work of prose, though it's no less a work of music than a musical work. That's not me suggesting it'll expire, as it were, become less relevant as time goes on. I don't write like that. The story is told by a woman who could be many of us. Who speaks for many of us, how many of us feel. She's melting down in a sense, as she's trying to force herself on. Rally herself. Find a way.

She's a single mother of two kids. She has a sibling with a far more favorable life. She's the caretaker for her elderly parents. Money is always an issue. She's divorced. She's battling technology, the attitudes and advice of others, loneliness, a dearth of empathy, trying to parent her kids right in a world making it harder and harder to raise thinking, curious children who go on to become thinking, curious adults. She feels like she's lost it or is losing it but she can't afford to. She's fearful for what's going to happen to her when she gets to be her parents' age after she's seen what's happened to them. She's internalizing all of this, like it's a her thing. Because there's comfort in it being you, paradoxically, rather than the world. Because you could change you, in theory, right? There's the idea of control. It's a story that really does become the anthem of the people. In this country, but not limited to. This is how it starts:

You’re probably just tired. Who wouldn’t be?

I say those words to myself so much that it’s like I’ve stopped understanding them as words and I’m this raw animal trying to decipher cadences only they’re my own.

But no matter how exhausted I get, I’d piss the bed of my life, flood the whole scene, if that meant waking up from from what would be hard to believe isn’t a nightmare were I not always hyper conscious of running a marathon without a finish line that has all these other races inside of it.

The side hustles. Mom and pop. And not the type of store. Who has the money? Sounds great, let’s all look out for each other, boo to corporations and billionaires, but you aren’t even able to look out for your sanity when you’re trying to stretch every last dollar around the block and it’s snapping back and slapping you in the face inside of six inches before it disappears.

I wonder if there’s ever been a mother with the sweat still on her who looked at her kid after they were born and thought, “Someday I’m going to need taking care of and I’ll be fucked if you don’t do it because no one else will.”

Talk about pissing the bed. If I’d known everything my parents wouldn’t be able to manage for themselves like turtles on their backs for what remains of the duration and how much they’d require of the kind of care that tests the far edges of love out way beyond the markers of asking and answering, where doing is just doing, those words could have grabbed a hold in my thoughts on the days I met my kids.

Chances were it’d only have been one of them if it was going to be either because that’s just how it works, which feels like I’m lashing out before the fact, but it almost always is.

Someone says, “Okay, I’ll do it” and anyone else in the running without wanting to be takes that to mean they’ll never need to step up and it’s bad form to ever suggest they lend a hand now that the matter has been settled however long ago that was.

Except you better remember to ask your sister about the latest nonprofit arts board she has plenty of time to play dress up for or you’re the asshole like the government goons who cuffed her landscapers in the neighbors’ yard after they’d finished working in hers and had them sent back to Mexico when she’d already paid for next week’s scheduled pruning.

But get off my back, chill, stop being so negative, give it a rest Ms. Holier Than Thou, because the crew she hired to replace them made her previously faltering azaleas look amazing and coincidentally also includes a man named Arturo like the earlier group of Mexicans or Hondurans or whatever they were that she can’t remember or didn’t bother to learn so she calls them her new A-Team and has another reason to say life really is what you make of it, don’t you know?

The winter we’ve had doesn’t help. None of the little things do that people say are what it’s really all about like you’re the problem if that’s lost on has-it-all-wrong you. Your errors in perspective aren’t the sunset’s fault. What more can you expect? Look at that sucker. All orb-y and magenta. Or what? Fuck the sea for not soothing you enough?

I'm going to say what I often say here, and that's that this isn't very close. There is no comparison between the first three stories--which could all be the result of the same variety of AI prompts--and this fourth example from the actual human artist. And that's at every level. The level of the sentence, the level of ideas, the level of stakes, and so on. Voice. Command.

These aren't good people. They're no different than if they were people who hated the very thought of literature or literature existing in this world. Literature as something important, for the personal good, that can do communal, societal, and universal good, that is hard to do--so very hard to do. Can't just be done because of how much money your family had or who you knew in Brooklyn or that you got an MFA.

I'm actually a big fan of snakes, so I'd like to apologize to them in the making of the analogy for this prose off. You guys don't do anything wrong. You pick off pests, and I'm sure if you could, you'd pick off people like Patrick Ryan.