People's Choice Literature

What do Americans truly want in a novel? What would it look like if their preferences and aversions materialized in book form? In Peoples Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has taken up this challenge, writing two groundbreaking novels based on a nationwide poll about literary tasteone featuring the story elements Americans most desire and another containing everything Americans despise. The Most Wanted Novel is a fast-paced thriller evoking page-turners by Dan Brown, David Baldacci, and Janet Evanovich. It follows a California woman pulled into a tech tycoons apocalyptic ambitions after her brothers kidnapping, teaming up with a hunky FBI agent with a tragic past. The Most Unwanted Novel is a genre-bending doorstopper: an epistolary Christmas novel set on a near-future Mars, where elderly aristocratic tennis players scour the globe for lost love, venturing from the coldest of arctic wastelands to the darkest caverns of the macabre. Variously recalling Kathy Acker, Csar Aira, and Philip K. Dick, it features sentient robots, talking animals, and a hundred-page collection of horror stories. Peoples Choice Literature is inspired by the artists Komar and Melamid, who created two now-infamous paintings based on opinion polling. A similar experiment by Dave Soldier produced The Most Wanted Song and The Most Unwanted Song. Comitta has adapted these methods to fiction, drawing on readers preferences about everything from genre to verb tense to characters identity, and incorporating machine learning data and passages written in collaboration with a large language model. Audacious and shockingly entertaining, Peoples Choice Literature also asks big questions about taste, authorship, and the notion of good writing.