I suspect that at some point in the next 18 months, the majority of the email in my inbox will be from imaginary people asking me to give money to literary services that do not exist. I am trying to maintain a good and jovial approach to this, but it’s also starting to get under my skin. In her excellent newsletter Agents & Books, the estimable Kate McKean titled a recent installment “Your Dream Agent: Who is She?” In my case, my expectations are a lot lower: my dream agent is an actual human being; everything other than that is, as they say, cake.

This week, I received multiple emails that struck me as…strange. Both asked if I was the author of the books Reel and Transitory. (I am! Available wherever books are sold, etc etc.) I replied in the affirmative, in part because, well, sometimes book people can be awkward. I am certainly awkward, especially when reaching out to people I don’t already know. 

By the second email, though, it seemed as though something was off. For starters, there was the name of the sender, which was one letter removed from the name of a long-running supporting character in the Marvel superhero universe. This, in turn, led me to the website of something called the Novirra Literary Book Club.

Quoth the Book Club’s website: “Novirra was founded by Nyra Solenne in 2024 with a quiet ambition: to gather, in one slow and luminous place, the readers who still believed in the long sentence.”

Okay, sure. Long sentences are having a moment, after all. I went from there to the Book Club’s “Authors” page and saw Brandon Hobson there. I have met Brandon multiple times and could confirm that the photograph of him there was, in fact, accurate. Perhaps this was, in fact, a legitimate venture.

Then I continued scrolling down the page and the unintentional humor began. Beginning with the Book Club’s entry for Miranda July, who — how best to phrase this — does not look remotely like this. 

Also on the “Authors” page are entries for both Denis Johnson and W.G. Sebald, both of whom are deceased, and both of whose photos are similarly inaccurate.

Perhaps I’m missing the point here; perhaps this is actually all a grand conceptual art piece, and next year I’ll walk into PS1 and see a dedicated record of all of this sprawling across one wall. Maybe these are actually dispatches from a parallel universe, one where W.G. Sebald is alive, female, and writes climate-oriented science fiction. It’s a mystery.

Still, as genuinely weird as all of this is, it’s also depressing. The world already has plenty of reasons to distrust other people and engage in bad-faith readings of correspondence. Things like this, entertaining as they may be, don’t help. We’re isolated enough as it it; the last thing we need is the conviction that a genuine attempt at connection is an AI-fueled scam in disguise.

I was previously a sleuth here.