But when you studied literature in school or university, I expect that you were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that this plot-focused way of reading was simplistic, and that you were trained to read in new ways where plot was largely irrelevant. The message is: Only amateurs read for the plot.<\/p>\n
But perhaps things are changing. I see glimmers of what the discipline might become in two new scholarly books, which hint at a future for literary scholarship if it learns to properly value the common experience of reading for the plot. Of course, you, reader, don\u2019t need literary scholars\u2019 help or endorsement to read for the plot. I\u2019m not so presumptuous as to think you need us at all.<\/p>\n
Rather, we need you. And we especially need the ways you read in your everyday life, as a reality check on the claims we make about how literature exists in the world.<\/p>\n
Lost in Whale Song<\/h4>\n
Would you trust a scholar who admitted to only having speed-read the texts on which they claimed expertise? Of course not. That\u2019s why scholars of all disciplines are expected to read slowly. Indeed, slow reading is taken to be one of the crucial conditions of knowledge for academic work. Reading slowly is associated with intellectual virtues like attentiveness, deliberation, open-mindedness, withholding of judgment. Whether a scholar is reading their primary objects of study (a historian examining archival documents, an anthropologist revisiting their own field notes) or scholarship written by their peers and predecessors, slowness enables a deep understanding.<\/p>\n
For scholars of literature in particular, reading slowly reveals fascinating and unexpected aspects of literary works, which would likely be missed when reading even at an ordinary pace. We literary scholars discover things about works of literature by lingering with the language longer than is strictly necessary.<\/p>\n
Like other literary scholars, I value such discoveries. Yet, in scholars\u2019 eagerness to defend the value of slow reading, less has been said about what we might miss by reading this way. One thing we miss is plot. At this ultraslow pace, the plot doesn\u2019t thicken, but rather thins.<\/p>\n
Take a sequence from a movie and slow it down to a crawl. Let\u2019s actually do it: Click this YouTube link<\/a>, skip to 5:40, mute the audio, and slow the playback speed to 0.25. See how every action becomes ponderously, meditatively slow.<\/p>\n In the time it takes Maya Rudolph to run into the street, with Kristen Wiig in pursuit, we have time to reflect on class, women\u2019s friendship, and the wedding-industrial complex. As each actress\u2019s microexpressions spread out from milliseconds to minutes, we may interpret entire volumes of emotional complexity in the darting of an eye or the furrowing of a brow. Any shot, slowed down, might offer the contemplative pleasures of a Bill Viola artwork<\/a>. All in all, our slow, hyperattentive viewing allows us to amass plenty of evidence for abstract, thematic, philosophical interpretations about the sequence.<\/p>\n But such \u201cslow reading\u201d of the movie has unintended consequences. The more we slow down, the harder it becomes to remember that Bridesmaids<\/em> is a raucous comedy, and that what\u2019s actually happening in the scene is a woman\u2014in a wedding dress, in the middle of a busy street\u2014emptying her bowels.<\/p>\n\n Another analogy, this time with music. Some years ago, a Justin Bieber song slowed down 800 percent<\/a> went viral. In this remix, a chirpy teen pop track is totally transformed, merely by slowness, into ambient mystical whale song. Listen for yourself. It\u2019s still recognizable as music, but the words are elongated to the point of incomprehension, familiar instruments decomposed into strange sounds. Like listening to real whale song, we have no idea what it\u2019s about, but a vague sense that it must be profound and spiritual.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not. \u201cU Smile\u201d is simply a song about how<\/p>\n Whenever you smile<\/p>\n I smile<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Cute, right? Not exactly deep. Even laying it out on the page as though it\u2019s poetry is a bit ridiculous. With movies and music, then, slowing down can end up producing a new object of deceptive profundity.<\/p>\n While movies and music have standard speeds at which they\u2019re played, books have no fixed reading speed. Readers are in control of their own pace. This has concealed just how profoundly scholars transform literary works by reading as slowly as we do. Just as movie scenes and songs become new, mysterious objects in their own right when drastically slowed down, so too do texts. Yes, we can<\/em> analyze a comedic pratfall at an extremely slow pace. But, in so doing, we risk missing the forest for the trees.<\/p>\n What do we miss when pop music becomes whale song and when a woman running for the bathroom becomes a meditation on capitalism? What do we miss when we treat every passage from a novel as a lyric poem? My answer: plot.<\/p>\n Scholars of literature and other narrative media (movies, TV shows, video games, opera, social media) have had little interest in reading for the plot. In Bridesmaids<\/em>, a woman runs for the nearest bathroom, but the food poisoning catches up with her. In \u201cU Smile,\u201d Bieber explains that his addressee\u2019s smile makes him smile. It may not be a lot, but this is what happens. Yet when we move from these miniature examples to full narratives, reading for what happens can be extremely compelling.<\/p>\n Literary scholars, however, tend to value and pay attention to other things like writing style, character psychology, connections to genres or other texts. If pushed, scholars might concede that acknowledging what happens is an important baseline for studying a novel or play, but that the really interesting thing is not what<\/em> happens but how<\/em> the story is told. Furthermore, many poems don\u2019t have plots, so plot can\u2019t be a requirement of literary<\/em> analysis in general. And anyway, a plot summary is something anyone can get from Wikipedia or CliffsNotes, so scholars must do something very different if we want to produce knowledge that\u2019s new.<\/p>\n In our slow, patient analysis of other aspects of literature, scholars have lost the plot. How might we get back to it, and why might we want to? Two new scholarly books\u2014John Guillory\u2019s On Close Reading<\/em> and Yoon Sun Lee\u2019s The Natural Laws of Plot<\/em>\u2014offer partial answers to those questions, centered on the \u201creading\u201d and \u201cplot\u201d parts respectively.<\/p>\n As John Guillory notes in On Close Reading<\/em>, the term \u201cslow reading\u201d was, for decades, an alternative name for the practices now widely referred to by literary scholars as \u201cclose reading.\u201d While close reading is not simply regular reading slowed down, it is certainly a slow way to read.<\/p>\n The phrase \u201cclose reading,\u201d despite the familiarity of the component words, is a piece of discipline-specific jargon. Guillory helpfully clarifies that close reading is just one specific scholarly subtype of a broader range of practices he labels \u201creading closely,\u201d encompassing \u201call instances of careful or methodical reading, whatever the aim or context of that reading.\u201d Consider, for example, the varied ways that lawyers, actors, or the New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s legendarily exacting fact-checkers read texts closely.<\/p>\n Guillory\u2019s aim in this slim but densely packed book is to offer a theory of what close reading is and a history of how it came to be. Literary scholars will find much to debate in Guillory\u2019s theory and history, as well as in Scott Newstok\u2019s remarkable annotated bibliography and accompanying online resource<\/a> tracing the forgotten history of \u201cclose reading\u201d as a term and as a practice.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Here I want to focus on a theme that runs through the book\u2014the judgment of literary value\u2014and how it relates to the scholarly neglect of reading for the plot. The link between close reading and value judgments has got buried over time\u2014even most literary scholars aren\u2019t aware of it nowadays.<\/p>\n As Guillory shows, close reading was a reaction against the literary critics of the 19th century, who had largely relied on their own authority to justify their judgments of the worth or worthlessness of a given book. In the early 20th century, scholars in the newly formed university departments of English Literature turned to close reading to explain why<\/em> literature was or wasn\u2019t valuable.<\/p>\n The core procedure of close reading, according to Guillory, is \u201cshowing the work of reading.\u201d Rather than simply asserting the conclusions they\u2019ve reached, close readers work step-by-step through their experiences that led them to their value judgment. In practice, this shift showed up in scholars\u2019 writings as a far greater use of quotation than their critic predecessors. Close readers weave quotations from their object of study into their prose, thus spelling out in detail their reading of the words on the page.2<\/a><\/sup> You may recall being told to \u201cshow your work\u201d in school mathematics exercises, where reaching the correct answer is invalid without writing out the steps in reasoning that got you there. Close reading has a similar purpose, pushing scholars to be explicit about the evidence for their judgments.<\/p>\n When scholars advocate for close reading as the best way to demonstrate the value of a work of literature, they connect with a conception of literary value that extends far beyond academia: that the most valuable works of literature have enduring<\/em> value. These are the books you return to across a lifetime, and that reward your repeated returns. Indeed, you may believe these books have enduring value not only in your own life but through the ages. Shakespeare is a \u201cclassic\u201d because he\u2019s stood the test of time. Toni Morrison is a \u201cmodern classic\u201d because her writing promises to speak to generations to come. Close reading is a kind of test, at the microscale of the passage, as to which writings inexhaustibly reward our individual and collective rereading. Scholars\u2019 close readings of a selective but growing canon of literary works constitute a body of evidence, proving that these works\u2014rescued from a sea of second-rate, mediocre, and actively bad writing\u2014will endure.<\/p>\n As close reading rose in status in the course of the 20th century\u2014and here I\u2019m going beyond what Guillory covers\u2014I want to suggest that reading for the plot became associated with lesser-valued literary experiences: ephemeral, disposable, short lived, a one-time trick. A suspenseful plot might temporarily hold readers under its spell, compelled to read on by the question of what happens next. But once you know the ending the experience can\u2019t be repeated. Thus, the reasoning goes, the power of plot is not enduring. What\u2019s valuable about reading Shakespeare or Morrison is their characters, their style, their philosophy, their cosmology, not their plots. Rereading indicates enduring value (and close reading is a subspecies of rereading) whereas the value of reading for the plot can only be fleeting.<\/p>\n Yet something is now shifting, and Guillory\u2019s book gives a clue as to why. A century ago, close reading emerged as a new way to identify and celebrate the superior value of great literature at a time when vast quantities of mass-market literature (which was often plot-driven \u201cgenre\u201d fiction) as well as new narrative media like movies and radio serials were competing for audiences\u2019 leisure time. Today, however, the most threatening antagonist to \u201cgreat\u201d literature isn\u2019t reading for the plot, but, rather, the \u201cskimming or browsing practices of reading\u201d fostered by the internet, smartphones, and social media. Push notifications and snippets of text and video hijack our attention briefly but constantly. In this context, reading for the plot, which once was judged disposable and mindless, starts to seem, by virtue of its extended duration and power to grip us, like an admirable act of sustained attention.<\/p>\n Perhaps enduring rereadability is being replaced as our culture\u2019s criterion of literary value with, simply, \u201csustained attention.\u201d You may have noticed people, or even yourself, lamenting that they \u201cno longer read.\u201d But as Christina Lupton pointed out to me in a podcast conversation, when we feel that we\u2019re \u201cno longer reading,\u201d what we\u2019re usually missing is not reading in general (encompassing things like emails, websites, social media), but, specifically, the sustained linear reading associated with printed books, and in particular the immersive power of the novel.3<\/a><\/sup> Scholars of literature have often struggled to connect with fans of literature. Both value the same thing\u2014literature\u2014so why the lack of mutual understanding?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n In the age of the attention economy, as our culture is reorganizing its ideas about reading, scholarly close reading and everyday reading for the plot have gone from enemies to allies. Now, both<\/em> can be valued, since both resist exploitative digital distraction. Perhaps, if scholars follow Guillory\u2019s lead\u2014and think about close reading as \u201cone technique of reading among others, \u2026 a node in a larger, unorganized network of attentional techniques\u201d\u2014we can learn to incorporate a broader range of reading experiences into our scholarship. And, in the meantime, be less dismissive of reading for the plot.<\/p>\n Yet I have my doubts about how far scholars can go, for reasons that extend beyond the discipline of literature. Academic success\u2014across the humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences\u2014depends on differentiating yourself from your peers, colleagues, and predecessors. I\u2019m painfully aware that I won\u2019t get an academic job, over the hundreds of other applicants, if I\u2019m simply doing what others can easily do too. Close reading in particular serves to distinguish one literary scholar from another, since each scholar selects a somewhat different set of passages and interprets those passages differently from their predecessors. (Guillory\u2019s previous book, Professing Criticism<\/em>, was sharp on the contortions that literary scholars undergo as they pursue a university career.)<\/p>\n Reading for the plot, meanwhile, does not generate unique \u201creadings.\u201d On the contrary, readers tend to have broad consensus on the question of what happens in a story (experimental and avant-garde narratives aside). That\u2019s only a problem for scholars. Outside academia, sharing an experience that doesn\u2019t differentiate you from others can be a source of delight. In an episode of Will & Grace<\/em>, Will and Karen discover they\u2019re reading the same novel and excitedly begin to discuss the plot:<\/p>\n Will: Hey, so where are you in the book?<\/p>\n Karen: Oh! Diane just found out about Mark\u2019s affair.<\/p>\n Will: Wait till you find out who it\u2019s with.<\/p>\n Karen: Oh, honey, I know who it\u2019s with!<\/p>\n Will: You think you do. But you don\u2019t!<\/p>\n Karen: It\u2019s not \u2026?<\/p>\n Will: Uh-uh.<\/p>\n Karen: Is it \u2026?<\/p>\n Will: Maybe.<\/p>\n Karen: Oh, you little book tease!4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Will and Karen\u2019s inscrutable exchanges about what happens in the book enrage their friend Jack, who hasn\u2019t read it, and whose affronted squeals and huffs generate comedy throughout the episode. But for Karen and Will, there\u2019s a palpable joy in discussing their shared experience of the same plot. There\u2019s no interpretation, certainly no close reading, just excited conversation about their experiences of plot.<\/p>\n Still, being good at talking about plot with other first-time readers\u2014being a good book tease\u2014may help you make friends, but won\u2019t get you an academic job.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n What happens in a novel? Beneath this question, Yoon Sun Lee uncovers a dense network of philosophical and scientific thinking in her remarkable The Natural Laws of Plot<\/em>. The \u201cnatural laws\u201d of the title refer to the theories of \u201cnatural philosophers\u201d in the 18th and early 19th centuries, who worked to identify regular relations of cause and effect across fields such as physics, botany, and medicine. For these investigators of the natural world, what happened in an individual instance or across a series of repeated experiments was determined by, and allowed humans to probe, the laws of nature.<\/p>\n Likewise, the novelists of this period, as Lee demonstrates, began to explain events in their plot as being both enabled and constrained by natural laws. These include the physics that holds open a heavy window using counterweights (weights which, when removed, lead in Tristram Shandy<\/em> to the protagonist\u2019s unwanted circumcision\u2014ouch!) and the regular motion of tides (which allow Robinson Crusoe, at the right time of day, to retrieve life-saving cargo from his sunken ship\u2014yay!). As these incidents from novels show, natural laws shape what can happen in a plot (and how, and when, and where \u2026). Far from being an inert backdrop to events, the natural world of these novels is inextricable from the plot. Lee argues that this intertwining of plot and natural laws gave novels an unprecedented feeling of realism.<\/p>\n As with Guillory, I won\u2019t linger on the overarching history or theory. Instead, I\u2019ll focus on a theme I find most enriching for the topic of reading<\/em> for the plot: quixotism. In short, quixotism describes characters, like the protagonist of Cervantes\u2019s Don Quixote<\/em>, who drastically misunderstand the world they\u2019re in. The phrase \u201ctilting at windmills\u201d has become an idiom of the English language, and refers to an episode in which Quixote mistakes a group of windmills for giants, charges at them with his lance, and is sent flying. From the perspective Lee offers us, Quixote\u2019s knightly delusions come crashing into the natural laws of wind power and angular momentum, and the laws win.<\/p>\n Quixotism involves a character\u2019s subjective misunderstanding of an objective reality, and the plot involves subjectivity eventually ceding to objectivity. \u201cQuixotism ties the shape of the plot,\u201d Lee explains, \u201cto the distorted beliefs and perceptions of its protagonist.\u201d<\/p>\n Up through the 18th century, novels typically treated quixotism with dramatic irony: Readers were informed beforehand<\/em> what was objectively happening. In the windmills episode, sidekick Sancho Panza tells Quixote (and thus readers) that the \u201cgiants\u201d are windmills before Quixote attacks them. Thanks to dramatic irony, then, the quixote is surprised to discover what\u2019s really happening, but readers aren\u2019t. In these early quixotic narratives, there was little \u201csurprise\u201d for readers in the question of what will happen<\/em> or what will come to light. Later in the eighteenth century, though, quixotism becomes an unexpected source of suspense in its own right. And suspense starts to be understood as something that can counteract a tendency to remain trapped within the self. Classic quixotes are those who cannot feel suspense because they are confident that they already know how everything will turn out. Plots can now draw quixotes out of themselves, and draw us out of ourselves<\/em> by hinting at secrets but not fully unveiling them until the end (emphases mine).<\/p>\n The \u201cus\u201d at the end here is evidently not scholarly readers, but, specifically, first-time readers reading for the plot. At the turn of the 19th century, novelists introduced a technique where the centuries-long tradition of surprising quixotic characters also became a way to spring surprises on readers. We may think we \u201calready know how everything will turn out,\u201d but the plot will eventually prove us wrong.<\/p>\n\n I\u2019m currently writing a book on the history of the plot twist, and Lee\u2019s account points to metaphysical depths (what is objectively real? how can I know it?) in the dizzying experience of discovering together with a protagonist that, all along, what you thought was happening in the plot was very different from what was really happening. I\u2019ll withhold spoilers but you might think of 19th-century novels like Jane Austen\u2019s Emma<\/em>, Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s Jane Eyre<\/em>, or Charles Dickens\u2019s Great Expectations<\/em>. Closer to the present, you might think of movies like The Sixth Sense<\/em> and Parasite<\/em>, TV shows like The Good Place<\/em> and Black Mirror<\/em>, or video games like Final Fantasy VII<\/em> and Pentiment<\/em>. Unlike a deus ex machina\u2014a surprise that comes out of the blue\u2014the big reveal of a twist narrative is all the more astonishing because clues have been present in the plot all along, we just didn\u2019t realize it. The revelation pushes readers\u2014sometimes delightfully, sometimes disturbingly\u2014to rethink on the fly our own assumptions about what\u2019s been happening. Sometimes we may even return to earlier scenes and reinterpret them from a newfound perspective of dramatic irony. In short, these examples show that, far from being mindless obsession, reading for the plot can involve intense thinking and attention to the text.<\/p>\n We are inheritors of the 19th century in appreciating the power of plot to astonish. The practice of spoiler alerts shows how much people value surprise and seek to protect surprises for each other. Scholarly readings of a narrative, however, always come from the opposite perspective of dramatic irony. Regardless of how the text sequences what readers know and when they know it, scholars\u2019 close readings presuppose a full retrospective knowledge of what happens across the entire text. It would be absurd for a scholar to express surprise at what happens in the passage they\u2019re close reading. A recent SNL sketch, \u201cThe Couple You Can\u2019t Believe Are Together,\u201d<\/a> holds a mirror up to this absurdity in having brash fitness instructor Grant react with misplaced enthusiasm to the poetry of his dowdy girlfriend Alyssa.<\/p>\n Alyssa: The celadon waves lap against the lighthouse, softly, as if they\u2019re dreaming of another life \u2026<\/p>\n Grant: Boom! Slam it on that lighthouse, baby! Bang! Then what, baby, then what? Tell \u2019em what happens after that!<\/p>\n Alyssa: The old man watches the hourglass \u2026<\/p>\n Grant, recoiling in shock: Oh damn! Oh damn! Where did that old man come from?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Mistakenly treating this lyric poem as a narrative, Grant is thrilled by each new line as though it\u2019s a stunt in an action movie. Grant comes across as foolish, but literary scholars (despite our performance of seriousness) may be equally foolish in applying poetic<\/em> modes of reading\u2014close reading\u2014to works of literature where plot is<\/em> central. Plot\u2019s power to astonish, while misapplied in Grant\u2019s case, is a power literary scholars have neglected due to our one-sided investment in reading with dramatic irony.<\/p>\n Lee\u2019s theory of quixotic plots gives new reasons to value surprise. For characters, the surprise of discovering they\u2019ve been wrong reveals an objective reality. Whether the revelation is humiliating, joyful, or terrifying, it\u2019s valuable<\/em>: The character now understands something fundamental about the way the world works (defying gravity is not an option in realist fiction). More generally, Lee also gives scholars new reasons to value reading for the plot. The connections she makes between, on the one hand, reading for the plot and, on the other hand, philosophically dense questions about the distorting nature of subjectivity and the objective nature of the world are a boon for scholars wanting to make the case that plot is a worthy object of study.<\/p>\n Beyond the scholarly community, I also take Lee\u2019s theory of quixotism to imply something about reading in general, namely that a first-time reader\u2019s partial and perhaps error-prone understanding isn\u2019t a bug but a feature. Readers are supposed<\/em> to initially misunderstand what\u2019s happening in a twist narrative, for example. A twist can fall flat if we see it coming. Scholars don\u2019t like to get things wrong, sure, but when it comes to reading for the plot, readers\u2019 expectations about what will happen give the first reading value.<\/p>\n I began by evoking what we\u2019re able to perceive, as well as what we miss, when experiencing art at a radically slowed pace. Guillory\u2019s book helps explain the conception of literary value\u2014enduring rereadability\u2014that motivates this scholarly practice, and the consequent neglect (and perhaps newly emerging appreciation) of reading for the plot. Lee\u2019s book, in particular her account of quixotism, gives scholars new reasons to take plot\u2014and the ordinary experiences of reading for the plot\u2014more seriously. Together, they point toward a more expansive approach to reading, which would not only enrich our discipline intellectually, but also build deeper connections between our work and readers outside the discipline.<\/p>\n Scholars of literature have often struggled to connect with fans of literature. Both value the same thing\u2014literature\u2014so why the lack of mutual understanding? A major obstacle as I see it is that scholars and fans value very different kinds of reading. To secure professional status for ourselves and our discipline, scholars have amplified this difference still further. But as I wrote at the start, despite our air of superiority, we need you.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not worried for the future of reading for the plot. The popularity of TV shows, movies, video games, podcasts, and novels, as well as plot-driven genres like romance, fantasy, and true crime, attests to an enduring appetite for stories. The world doesn\u2019t need any help from us scholars in reading for the plot.<\/p>\n Perhaps, though, we might eventually enrich your reading experiences by uncovering forgotten histories (for instance, in times and places beyond the focus on 18th- and 19th-century Britain in Lee\u2019s book) and developing new concepts (expanding on the passing mentions of \u201cimmersive\u201d reading in Guillory\u2019s book, for example) to better understand the value and appeal of reading for the plot. For my part, this has been the motivation of my podcast How To Read<\/em>.5<\/a><\/sup> But such a shift in the discipline would first require a humility we\u2019re trained not to feel: the humility to consider that we might have something to learn from you about reading, and not the other way round. Will we prove ourselves worthy of your attention? The story is far from over.<\/p>\n Scholars of literature have often struggled to connect with fans of literature. Both value the same thing, so why the lack of mutual understanding?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":59473,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[615,1319,20,2440,461,1042,1192],"pbpartner":[],"section":[],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-59455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-literary-criticism","tag-literary-studies","tag-literature","tag-plot","tag-reading","tag-university-of-chicago-press","tag-university-of-pennsylvania-press"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/debby-hudson-asviIGR3CPE-unsplash-1000x600.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n Interpret or Judge?: John Guillory on the Future of Literary Criticism<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\nEnemies to Allies<\/h4>\n
\n<\/p>\n\n
\n\u201cImmersive reading\u201d is a term Guillory uses intermittently throughout the book as a foil to close reading. Immersive reading is \u201cthe extracurricular reading of fiction, in which the reader is driven constantly forward, without pausing for closer inspection of the text.\u201d Close reading, by implication, resists the \u201cforward drive\u201d and does pause for \u201ccloser inspection.\u201d Yet by the end of the book, when evoking our age of digitally distracted reading, Guillory suggests literary scholars \u201cmight even want to concede the greater social value<\/em> of immersive reading\u201d (emphasis mine) compared to close reading, if only because far more people read for the plot than close-read. So while the two practices remain distinct, they now find themselves on the same side of a new battle.<\/p>\nTilting at Windmills<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/vince-fleming-Vmr8bGURExo-unsplash-1000x600.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n Autofiction Writers of the World, Unite!<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Brouillette-headshot-300x300.jpg\")
<\/a>\n \n Sarah Brouillette <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \nWhat Happens Next?<\/h4>\n