Criteria for Auraist picks
Plus the problem it aims to solve
The problem
A good number of books enthused about by mainstream reviewers and nominated for major literary prizes contain prose that at best isn’t very impressive, and at worst could conceivably have been written by AI. Books like this shouldn’t receive nominations for important prizes or appear on prestigious year-end lists and the like, we believe, no matter how accomplished or original their ideas, stories, or characters.
But some lists and reviews feature books clearly written by a human, and occasionally beautifully so. Auraist will identify these books, both fiction and non-fiction, literary fiction and genre fiction, and publish extracts from them to give you an idea of their quality of writing. We’ll also interview authors of these books not on the usual subjects of biography and theme and inspiration, but on what it takes to produce the very best sentences.
Auraist’s main purpose, then: to cherrypick from prize shortlists, end-of-year lists, and major reviews the most stylishly, most humanly written books, and in doing so to help support those who write them. If you’ve found yourself giving up on highly praised books because they’re unimpressively written, then Auraist is for you.
Criteria for our picks
Expect a high tolerance for literary showing-off. Jean Toomer, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, mid-career Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Lockwood, Megan Abbott, James Ellroy, The Red Riding Quartet, The Vorrh Trilogy, William Gibson, Consider the Lobster, The War Against Cliché – none of these seem to us guilty of overwriting. They are in fact the kind of writers and books we’re hoping to discover and share with you here.
You can also expect the picks to feature some mix of inventiveness, virtuosity, energy, authority, clarity, precision, concision, richness, tonal complexity, musicality, and that elusive quality generally known as charm or charisma.
Expect less tolerance for sentences that feel too second-guessed, whose writers seem frightened at the prospect of seeming to show off, or of writing with a strong and clearly human voice. This kind of prose, the Replicant Voice, features frustratingly often in prize-nominated and rave-reviewed publications, but unless there’s a compelling reason for doing otherwise we won’t be featuring them here.
Which is not to say that toned-down writing will never be picked as the best. Joy Williams, Olga Ravn, Flannery O’Connor, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tana French, Thomas Harris, Denis Lehane, Michael Lewis, Mark Fisher, and plenty others have written prose that’s unshowy yet highly accomplished.
A rare kind of writing is that which combines linguistic facility with a quality that’s so unusual there doesn’t seem to be a widely agreed name for it, but which is sometimes called grunge or scuffed. Prose with some degree of give, that’s so assured the writer has the confidence not to keep editing to an ever finer polish, but to do the opposite, to undercut their own polish with faux-sloppiness. This combination of facility and scuffedness can be found in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Riddley Walker, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, Jesus’ Son, The Man Who Walks, Praiseworthy, Paradise Logic, and Kick the Latch. If prizelists or reviews feature publications with this combination, then it’s likely they’ll also feature here.
Browse our picks from recent releases here, and from prize shortlists here.