Book Release: People's Choice Literature with Tom Comitta and George Chen

What do Americans truly want in a novel? What would it look like if their preferences and aversions materialized in book form? In People’s Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has taken up this challenge, writing two groundbreaking novels based on a nationwide poll about literary taste—one featuring the story elements Americans most desire and another containing everything Americans despise.

"People’s Choice Literature is an unusual and brilliant book . . . offering a truly unique and unrepeatable form of critical and practical 'cultural intervention." - Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

"Comitta revives fundamental questions about art for the age of big data and mass publishing: Who makes culture and who consumes it? What is the role of populism in art? Clever, relevant, and very funny, People's Choice Literature does more than entertain—it questions the rules of entertainment itself." - Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape

Tom Comitta is the author of People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (Columbia University Press), and two supercut novels from Coffee House Press: The Nature Book and Patchwork. Their fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, and BOMB.

George Chen is a writer and performer from the San Francisco Bay Area now based in Los Angeles. He runs the label ZUM, produces the Sup Doc documentary podcast, and hosts the variety comedy show Talkies.