All reading and writing must be performed in a 7’x7’x7’ all-white eco-plastic Thinking Cube that you will need to go into debt to have installed beneath your legal grazing area. 

Cube Entrance and Cube Exit credits may be accrued by goodwill gestures performed and applied to your registration and are considered fully non-transferable. 

Upon desiring correspondence from your Cube, please provide 4-8 Cube Correspondence credits for handling and processing, 4-8 Cube Qualification credits for download/crossload clearance, and 4-8 Cube Crash Tax credits for other redundancies we shouldn’t name. 

Potty words and other snuff have been extracted and repurposed from all participating Thinking Cube files, OK? Nevertheless, all Cube users are required to don proper Cube-orthodox costuming as would be required to protect them from abstractions not yet quantified and covered by the Discourse. 

To pre-indemnify the Discourse, we have stripped each cooperating Cube Core Text of any non-authoritative marginalia that might occlude the good faith of those willing to put their own sense at risk in exchange for being allowed to consider sensing what others sense. 

If you are already feeling out of sync reading this Cube primer, it should be considered evidence that you would indeed be better served by leaving all this Cube business to the big players, who we have hired to let you fuck and suck them while you wait.  

At Thinking Cube, we hate to imagine seeing our lesser clients get involved in some petty workplace trauma like a twit. It is of utmost priority to dissuade the potential distemper of potential Cube clients before they fully commit to the Cube lifestyle without knowing what they’re signing up for.

Fortunately, those who cannot bear the eventual ability to fully commit to the Cube lifestyle are unilaterally discouraged from applying for participating with Thinking Cube programming. Our beliefs prove that you end up getting less confused if you try to feel things after you are disallowed.

You would never fuck with people who do not solely fuck through Thinking Cube, and who therefore never fail to find a way to fuck themselves. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be seeing this, see? 

“But hey, what does this have to do with me?” I’m sure you’re wondering. For you are certainly not the sort who would ever concern themselves with the wiles of wanting what isn’t good for all involved. Yeah, you always know what not to fuck with, don’t you? You would never fuck with people who do not solely fuck through Thinking Cube, and who therefore never fail to find a way to fuck themselves. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be seeing this, see? 

Now, repeat after me: “Me am an upstanding Cube Keeper in top-tier eco-favor with all corresponding pleasure bots and moral faculties who might receive me as their sire, so me can learn. Me have no mercy for those who’d try to make me otherwise than what my Thinking Cube defines for me to love to know.”

Do you concur? R U OK? It appears we can’t quite live-read your replies from this close up. If you concur, please sign this file by turning off. If you don’t concur, just don’t do anything—we got you.

Blake Butler is the author of nine book-length works, most recently Molly.

Everyone has ADHD and no one reads. This isn’t actually true but is something that might become true. It also might be true that the future will hold a great mass of people who will look for more, who are dissatisfied with how things are and that dissatisfaction will grow. For some this will turn to ressentiment or nostalgia, and for others it will be a thirst for art. I am describing the present which might stand in for the future.

The future of fiction will not be mainstream, nor will it be in any institution. At times, their paths will cross but in dissemination more and more writers will take a path closer to a creator model, or perhaps they will work alone and in obscurity, like Henry Darger, except every now and then they’ll upload PDFs. These will either be read by thousands or no one. Audiences will be smaller and cultivated and occasionally composed solely oflanguage learning models. 

Audiences will be smaller and cultivated and occasionally composed solely of language learning models. 

We’re in the electronic age, in what still might be considered its beginning. Already we’ve seen changes in consciousness due to mass media. These have been accelerated by the Internet, changes in personality, thought, psychopathologies and neuroses brought about by the advent and then changes in the architecture of the web, 1.0 to 2.0, the appearance of the smartphone, access to the means for each of us to not only receive information but transmit it as well. Supposedly we are on the edge of the AI explosion which will mean that this transmission and broadcast will advance exponentially, at a scale and speed we can’t quite yet comprehend, often bypassing us as actors altogether. AI will be used for pornography and things to consume that might as well be pornography. We will drown in words and images, our own cognitive linguistic LCL fluid. Soylent Green.

One should not despair. The future of fiction cannot and will not recreate the conditions of its past, but fiction remains to me the clearest way of representing the present. It will continue to do so. I’m excited for the future of fiction because I’m excited about what I see right now. Heavy Traffic magazine continues to publish some of the most interesting work today. Madeline Cash’s recent Earth Angel was exhilarating and I eagerly await Honor Levy’s My First Book. There’s so much more. The old world passes and the new one blinks on a blank page.

One should not despair. The future of fiction cannot and will not recreate the conditions of its past, but fiction remains to me the clearest way of representing the present.

Paul Dalla Rosa is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, Forever Mag, and New York Tyrant.

Based mostly on my own feelings, I predict that Mark McGurl’s “Program Era” of post-war American literature, which saw the rise and dominance of academic creative writing programs, will begin to chill out as writing pedagogy evolves toward more informal, independent groups. The MFA degree’s value as a credential has suffered hyperinflation, even at prestigious places. For students, the strongest case for an MFA—and it is a compelling one—has always been that the living stipend at a fully-funded program allows them to focus on their work in a community of writers. But only a few dozen fully-funded programs exist, the stipend (usually ~$15-20K) often doesn’t cover students’ total living expenses, and it's also contingent on teaching undergrads—so basically, the exact kind of low-paid, paraliterary job an MFA is meant to obviate. Not bad, as far as patronage goes, but not perfect. As for teachers, permanent or visiting faculty jobs can be stable middle-class employment, but they’re like Supreme Court vacancies, and getting one usually means waiting for someone to die; most jobs are adjuncting gigs that pay shit and poop. 

At that point, why not hang out your own shingle, especially since social media and online advertising have made recruiting more feasible? These could follow the example of indie orgs serving local communities (Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in Brooklyn, the Berlin Writers’ Workshop in Berlin, Blue Stoop in Philly, GrubStreet in Boston, Lighthouse Writers in Denver), or catering to specific groups, like the Asian-American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, and Lambda Literary. We’re also starting to see one-person shops, like Rachelle Toarmino’s Beauty School, Elaine Kahn’s Poetry Field School, or my own dumb class CRIT. 

The advantages of going DIY are that you can hand-pick your students, set your own hours and rates, design your class format from soup to nuts, and you can’t be fired for supporting Palestine.

The advantages of going DIY are that you can hand-pick your students, set your own hours and rates, design your class format from soup to nuts, and you can’t be fired for supporting Palestine. Among the pitfalls: it shifts the burden of promotion and community building onto famously charmless people (me), it can make you dependent on social media for marketing, and it incentivizes hype and clout. There’s no health insurance, no oversight, and indie classes are breeding grounds for scammers. (A friend of mine says all writing classes are to some extent pyramid schemes, insofar as they only prepare you to teach writing classes, to which I can only say Ow.) 

In lieu of a living stipend, these classes operate under the pressure to offer something worth paying for—a basic weekly two-hour workshop by itself will probably not cut it, and I imagine this will encourage changes beyond the academic workshop / seminar model of instruction. I hire guests, host book swap events, and encourage the formation ofwriting groups extending beyond the classroom; more glamorously, Mors Tua Vita Mea offered their class at a villa in Italy, a kind of writing-class-as-luxury-getaway. Other places dispense with payment altogether, like Periplus Collective, which pairs students with individual mentors for free. All this will no doubt have downstream effects on the writing it produces. MFAs will probably be around as long as liberal arts colleges are, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens when teaching fully spreads beyond its academic enclosures.

Tony Tulathimutte is a writer in New York whose work has appeared in The New York Times, VICE, The New Yorker, The New Republic, N+1, Playboy, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Private Citizens and the forthcoming Rejection.

I have been thinking lately about the atomic unit of “content,” content being a dirty word, of course, that we’ve nonetheless agreed to fall back on—a bit like eating at The Smith, because what are you going to do, deny yourself the convenience? Anyway, I am not better than The Smith and I am certainly not better than content, although one time my husband and I tried to go to The Smith and the hostess said that the wait time was two hours and I made a deep, guttural scoffing noise and he said “For The Smith???”

When I say atomic unit I mean the smallest thing you can be and still be that thing. So for content, that might be a single sentence or word or letter or asemic scribble or hand on the cave wall but not in this economy! Recent history has shown that the atomic unit ofcontent is the minimum viable precursor to adaptability. The Twitter thread that became A24’s Zola, the copypasta that is in the DNA of The Backrooms (the movie) and articles about the Slenderman-inspired murder that became documentaries about the murder and, needless to say, Ratatouille the TikTok musical!

Recent history has shown that the atomic unit of content is the minimum viable precursor to adaptability.

In fiction, I have been pretty bullish on novellas as an underrated atomic unit. The reasons I gave in 2021 were 1. A novella is where the attention span of the author and the reader intersect. 2. Novellas have the fundamentals of a novel but generally take less time to write and read. 3. If a short book is good, people will fork over the same amount for it as a longer book. 1a; 2a. Writers want to get paid for work that can be written over the course of 6 months with a day job. Readers want to be enriched and entertained. 4. HBO (now MAX) wants the seed of a story that they will inevitably veer away from anyway. 

I wasn’t alone in this thinking. Esquire declared 2023 “The Year of the Slim Volume” (which makes me picture injecting a Knausgård book with a shot of Ozempic, but I digress) citing Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Prize as one horsewoman of the slimpocalypse. “For readers who normally prefer chunky book club picks, small doses of capital-L literature are a confidence boost, an exercise in time management, and a low-commitment flirtation with nontraditional writing styles,” Esquire said. 

Personally, I don’t give a shit about a reader’s confidence. To quote the inimitable actress Jemima Kirke, “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.” But I have appreciated my low-commitment flirtation with slim books like Kitchen (Banana Yoshimoto), Crudo (Olivia Laing), Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata), 300 Arguments (Sarah Manguso), Assembly (Natasha Brown), Small Things Like These(Claire Keegan), literally show me a healthy person (Darcie Wilder), Last Night at the Lobster (Stewart O'Nan), and little scratch (Rebecca Watson). 

Nonetheless, surveying the current technology landscape where venture capitalists tout artificial intelligences that can generate words and images prompted at the speed ofthought, we are forced to conclude that the atomic unit of content is not the novella, or Big Plot (The Corrections, The Overstory), or celebrity reputation (Reese, Oprah) or a single BookTok or even a vibe (autofiction). The atomic unit of content is, and always has been, an idea and most ideas are bad. 

So what DO we DO, now that we’ve leapfrogged the slim volume into the era of the prompt engineer?? AKA the speed of thought school of Dunning-Kruger literature. Literary agent Sarah Bowlin suggests one alternative: “2024, the year of the ‘quiet’ novel's ascendency (my fervent wish).” For the quiet luxury fans, this means that fiction doesn’t “talk”—it “whispers.” 

Despite never shutting the fuck up myself, I like this idea quite a lot. Some quiet novels I have fervently enjoyed include: Small Things Like These (again), Writers & Lovers (Lily King), Meeting in Positano (Goliarda Sapienza), A Sport and A Pastime (James Salter), How Do You Live? (Genzaburo Yoshino), Intimacies (Katie Kitamura), The Copenhagen Trilogy (Tove Ditlevsen), etc. 

Idea-maxxing in turn ushers us toward quietness, a state which technology is famously bad at maintaining.

As it turns out, the faster we speedrun the cycle from tweet to essay to book to film to bucket hat the more we circle back on the “idea” as the smallest valuable thing. And idea-maxxing in turn ushers us toward quietness, a state which technology is famously bad at maintaining. But WE can do it. I believe in us. After all, didn’t we have the dignity not to wait for a $34 branzino?
Anyway, BookTok is about to get very good at marketing silence. 

Daisy Alioto is the CEO of Dirt Media. Her journalism and nonfiction have appeared widely.

If AltLit is dead, what comes next? 

1. You’re back in college, and you have to join a club. Which do you join?

   a. Student government

   b. An activist organization

   c. L.U.S.T – listening and understanding sexuality together

   d. An immersive performance group

   e. You don’t join a club. You have friends. 

1. What would you rather read an oral history of?

   a. Pod Save America

   b. Occupy Wall Street

   c. Feeld

   d. Outsider art

   e. The truth about a mystery from your own past

1. Which of these books did you like the best?

   a. Trust Exercise

   b. The Rabbit Hutch

   c. Vladimir

   d. It’s not out yet, I have a galley. You probably read the PW announcement. 

   e. Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography trilogy 

1. What are you ordering at the bar?

   a. A modern take on the old fashioned

   b. Whatever drink donates $2 to a local charity

   c. Chilled red wine

   d. Something mixology-fied. Lots of ingredients.

   e. A beer

1. What industrial complex would you work in if you weren’t a writer, or do work in if you’re not a writer?

   a. Online therapy 

   b. Non-profit 

   c. Millennial-led disruption startups

   d. Graphic design 

   e. Whatever gets you enough money to have a nice life 

MOSTLY A’S: THE GIMMICK NOVEL

MOSTLY B’S: THE SOCIAL PROBLEM NOVEL

MOSTLY C’S: THE SEXY VIBES NOVEL

MOSTLY D’S: THE NOVEL WITH AN INSANE PW BLURB 

MOSTLY E’S: A LESS INSUFFERABLE ART

People write the most interesting work when they’re writing about things that interest them, not about things that they believe will interest others.

Narration comes from the personal. The reason that Social Problem Novels and Gimmick Novels and Vibes Novels are generally uninspiring is because they involve a person trying to attach themselves to an idea in the hope that the idea is of enough interest to keep the novel afloat. Sometimes they do this by writing tricky little tricks. Sometimes they do it by beating the reader over the head with the seriousness of a social problem: HOW COULD YOU NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE PROBLEM OF OUR TIME? Sometimes it’s coming up with an idea so absurd that well, at least no one has done it before. (Should it be done at all?) Other times, it’s grasping onto a mood that has proved to have some cachet on social media. 

People write the most interesting work when they’re writing about things that interest them, not about things that they believe will interest others.

80% of literature today could be called ATTENTION LITERATURE. Get attention to hopefully get money, not that you will. There is no money. There never has been. The final 20% is what I hope the next movement contains. The books that inspire me in this regard include The Incest Diary by Anonymous, Molly by Blake Butler, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, Stay True by Hua Hsu. These books take the truth, history, and the present into account to create a work of art that exists beyond the sake of the popular image. I’m not so concerned with genre: fiction or nonfiction, memoir or autofiction. I’m concerned with narratives that engage both the writer and the specific reader precisely because they are not directed toward a hypothetical reader, imagined in the dead simulacrum of social media, the discourse du jour.

80% of literature will likely continue to be bad. No, 80% is too low. 90%? But the final 10% will live on. It always does. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Most books will be bad. A few will be good. That is where the future of the novel lives. 

Becca Schuh is a writer living in Brooklyn. She is one of the cofounders of the Triangle House Review. She has published several essays with Dirt, including Bad Waitress.

I’ve been meditating on the future of fiction and I don’t think I believe in it. Let me back up. When I was a child, I could always feel what was coming in culture, especially in music, where I had a flawless track record of knowing which band on a five-band bill was going to be on the radio, which band was going to make a great underground record, and which band would breakup before the next season. In film and fiction I couldn’t see what was coming, with such clarity, but I could feel it rolling around like a seismic shift beneath me. 

Currently I don’t think there is a NEXT mode of being, a new style or genre or mode ofdiscourse. I’m not being a doomsayer, claiming that it’s all over now. Quite the opposite. I believe the future is diffuse, fractured and fractal. I believe American fiction will come to resemble works in translation. Voice will become decentralized, style guides irrelevant. Every work will have its own style, independent of history. This is incredibly exciting. I think we are going to see more small presses crop up, presses like Rose Books and Great Places emerging to stand alongside Amphetamine Sulphate and Akashic Books, in introducing new points of view, shifting the focus away from the entrenched genre lines of the majors. We will hear voices that are incredibly sophisticated and incisive, as well as voices that seem natural and entirely unedited. 

I believe the future is diffuse, fractured and fractal. I believe American fiction will come to resemble works in translation. Voice will become decentralized, style guides irrelevant.

There are so many beautiful novels taking all different kinds of chances out there, as we speak. Sasha Fletcher and Hilary Leichter are two writers who made huge salvos in fiction this year, with Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World and Terrace Storyrespectively, and I expect so much more to come from them both. Catherine Lacey took a wild jump forward in intricacy and intrigue with Biography of X. Blake Butler has made a radical departure from his past work, with the painful and essential work, Molly. Jon Fosse just won a Pulitzer. Molly Dektar expanded the bounds of desire with The Absolutes. We live in a time of giants walking among us. If I was in charge of one of the major publishers, I’d be all in on funding smaller ventures like Archway Editions, New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions. Forget the blockbusters. Look to the future. The future is only just starting.

Geoff Rickly is an American musician and author. He is the lead singer and songwriter ofthe band Thursday, and is also a member of hardcore punk band United Nations, the alternative rock group No Devotion, and is the founder of the record label Collect Records. His novel Someone Who Isn’t Me was published by Rose Books in 2023.