Literary trends: September 5, 2024

What's top of mind for bookworms, literary bloggers, and those in the publishing biz?

For Shelf Love, it's the descriptor "spicy" in front of books — the TL;DR is that it means nothing, really, about the book itself but more about social media platforms.

For writer Ted Chiang, it's artificial intelligence; he explains in The New Yorker why generative AI won't create art.

And for Patrick Redford, it's the book cover trend of featuring old-timey animals, which he writes about at Defector.