Dan Sinykin

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someday i won't live with a newborn and a toddler....

This is in just over an hour. Sam promised some disagreement, some argument.

These asshole twerps with no brains or education from DOGE really did use ChatGPT to find NEH grants to terminate ILLEGALLY - ruining hundreds lives and destroying hundreds of the greatest humanities projects and partnerships of our time. I’m overwhelmed with rage and anger all over again.

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.

In this delightful-to-write profile 1) Patterson critiqued my latest book cover (👎), 2) I found out why he’s co-writing books with Viola Davis and MrBeast, and 3) I tracked down the first book he wrote (but never published), and it’s a genuinely excellent literary story collection. (gift link!)

New essay about some creeps, contemporary and canonical, in the history of the novel. I'm thinking about the nexus of the romance plot, commercial surveillance, and "the desire of the other." DM me for a PDF!

This poster is amazing. Go see Ben & Quinn. More importantly, buy their damn book.

Pleased to say we’ll be recording an American Vandal in the middle of this tour as well.

open.substack.com/pub/zeithist...

a book title that is also an ethos: close reading for the twenty-first century

Predicting a return to reading books. It will be on the frontier of resisting subjection.

LIVE SOON: The Republic of Letters + Dan Sinykin Starting Mar 8 at 2:00 PM EDT

I’m talking with Sam Kahn tomorrow, Sunday March 8 at 2PM Eastern about Big Fiction for a Substack Live

open.substack.com/live-stream/...

hell yeah

Your job is to pick the worst actor to play James Bond.

This really is a great profile of an author who has shaped commercial publishing so much but may no longer be able to outrun its current changes.

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...

actually this would be perfect

Hear me out, @npr.org... new weekly show featuring authors, editors, agents, publishers, prize judges, fanfic aficionados, TV scouts, and READERS of all kinds. It's called "BookTalk" and you've already got your new host IN STUDIO!

https://open.substack.com/pub/theamericanvandal/p/criticism-and-the-chatbot-bubble?r=hykx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

https://theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/theory-at-the-bargaining-table-vandal

I have to admit, I was always a little confused by the idea of "live" podcasting. There were many nudges and false starts before this current season of Vandal Live went into production.

These are now the two most-downloaded episodes in the history of the pod.

Shows how much I know.

i must've read the flamethrowers in 2014 or 2015. i'm reading it now. i forgot, or never knew, how good it is.

Really happy to say that my article on Pynchon and Star Wars is out now in Studies in American Fiction. I'm grateful to SAF for supporting a long and idiosyncratic piece. Honestly, it's kind of my life's work thus far! (2025 date is presumably because of a backlog.)

muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

Spoke with Vara for this one, stoked to read it.

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.

From this www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Remarkable graph here of James Patterson's productivity over time

The Flamethrowers really has such DeLillo-esque prose. Is all Kushner like that? It's like McCarthy after Faulkner.

Kristi Noem misattributing a paraphrase of Rudyard Kipling to George Orwell really does sum it all up huh

"my favorite book of the year" 😭

front cover of the book Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant

making memes is a great classroom activity to complement the work students can do guided by my favorite book of the year

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