Resources

This list is still in flux and provisional. More to come…

Bolaño

• Chris Andrews, Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe
• Nicholas Birns and Juan F. De Castro (eds.), Roberto Bolaño as World Literature
• David Kubrick, The Savage Detectives Reread
• Ignacio López-Calvo (ed.), Roberto Bolaño, A Less Distant Star: Critical Essays
• Jonathan Monroe (ed.), Roberto Bolaño in Context
• Fernando Saucedo Lastra, México en la obra de Roberto Bolaño: Memoria y territorio

• Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Latin American Global Novel

theories of the novel

• Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), especially chapter four (“The Inner Form of the Novel”) and chapter five (“The Historico-philosophical Conditioning of the Novel and its Significance”)
• M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination (eds. Holquist & Emerson), Univ. of Texas Press (1981; orig. 1941).

the phenomenology of reading

• Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading”. New Literary History 1.1 (October 1969): 53-68.
• Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), especially chapter one (“On Being Attached”) and chapter two (“Art and Attunement”)

theories of narrative

• Noël Carroll, “Narrative Closure”
• Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Theory
• Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
• Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale

increaing length in novels and other genres

• Sam Adams, “What the Debate Over Long Movies Gets Wrong”
• Nick Clark, “Novels ‘have been getting substantially longer over last two decades'”
• Constance Grady, You’re not imagining it — movies are getting longer”
• Natalie Jarvey, “Why Are Movies Sooooo Long? An Investigation”
• Richard Lea, “The big question: are books getting longer?”
• Sarah Shaffi, “What’s the perfect length for a book?”
• Peter Shawn Taylor, “Books Just Keep Getting Longer”

commodification, literature, and cultural capital

• Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature
• David Cunningham, “Capitalist Epics: Abstraction, Totality, and the Theory of the Novel”
• David Cunningham, “‘Very Abstract and Terribly Concrete’: Capitalism and The Theory of the Novel”
• Priya Joshi, “The Novel as Commodity”
• Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One
• Andrew Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative

long books

• Stefano Ercolino, The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolano’s 2666
• Catherine Gallagher, “Formalism and Time”. Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (March 2000): 229–51.
• Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds., Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (The MIT Press: 2009).
• Colin Marshall, “An Introduction to Outsider Artist Henry Darger and His Bizarre 15,000-Page Illustrated Masterwork” Open Culture (February 18, 2026).
• Adam Mars-Jones, “Big Books”. London Review of Books 40.21 (November 8, 2018).
• Franco Moretti, The Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Máquez
• nostalgebraist, “About Henry Darger” (May 26 2011).
• Lindsay Thomas, “Modeling Long Novels: Network Analysis and A Brief History of Seven Killings“. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (2020): 653–67.
• Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio

distraction and reading endurance

• Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994)
• Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2016)
• Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (2015)
• Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011)
• Emma Loffhagen, “‘Last year I read 137 books’: could setting targets help you put down your phone and pick up a book?”. The Guardian (February 21, 2026).
• Sami Timimi and Jonathan Leo (eds), Rethinking ADHD: From Brain to Culture (2024).

students and teaching a post-literate population

• Johanna Alonso, “How Much Do Students Really Read?” Inside Higher Ed (September 25, 2024).
• Adam Kotsko, “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted: Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively”. Slate (February 11, 2024).
• Beth McMurtrie, “Is This the End of Reading?” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 9, 2024).
• Erik Hoel, “Fiction in the Age of Screens”
• Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books The Atlantic (November 2024).
• Jack Stripling, “Is Reading Over for Gen Z Students? What happens when students come to college less willing and able to do the work?” The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 10, 2024).
• Walt Hunter, “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are” The Atlantic (February 2, 2026).

reading and AI

• Naomi S. Baron, “AI is making reading books feel obsolete – and students have a lot to lose”
• Naomi S. Baron, Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters (2026)
• Karen Hao, Empire Of Ai
• Eric Mazur and Marc Watkins, “Reading and Writing in the Age of AI”
• Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence
• Dan McQuillan, “The Role of the University is to Resist AI”
• Chaoran Wang and Zhongfeng Tian (eds.), Rethinking Writing Education in the Age of Generative AI (2025)
• Marc Watkins, “No One is Talking About AI’s Impact on Reading”
• Marc Watkins, “Reading in the Age of Social Media (and AI)”

pedagogy

• Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
• Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study

other

• Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)”
• Benoit Mandelbrot, Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension
• Michael Moon, Darger’s Resources