It's a riot. It's tremendous fun to read. It's full of gags and winks.-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"
Pick up a novel and suddenly you're at the whim of the author's imagination. Plot, characters, setting -- you have no say in these matters. This is part of the appeal of fiction. Now, perhaps for the first time since Choose Your Own Adventure, Tom Comitta tweaks the equation in People's Choice Literature.-- "New York Times"
Tom Comitta has written what may become the definitive time capsule of our debased American literary minds. The book comprises two novels, The Most Wanted Novel, which is a thriller designed to emulate the secret sauce of airport bestsellers and The Most Unwanted Novel, a wildly angular mashup of sci-fi, tennis, and Christmas.-- "The Brooklyn Rail"
A fun and interesting exercise.-- "The Complete Review"
Tom Comitta is heir, simultaneously, to Laurence Sterne, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Kathy Acker, and in People's Choice Literature they have written the novel(s) as well as the novel theory that we need for our current age of public opinion polling, platform capitalism, and large language models. I don't know whether The Most Wanted Novel and The Most Unwanted Novel are so bad they're good, or so good they're bad, and by the end I couldn't even tell you which is which, but I do know that together these books form a pitch perfect, exuberantly creative response to the contemporary rise of uncreative writing.--Deidre Lynch, Harvard University
Tom Comitta is a master of literary constraint. Combining the rules-based writing of Oulipo with the highly structured practice of opinion polling, Comitta reveals the absurdity of modern culture's obsession with tracking taste. People's Choice Literature takes literature-by-the-numbers to its logical extreme to give readers what they want (and don't want) in surprisingly new forms. Danielle Steel reimagined as Gertrude Stein with a Lifetime subscription - need I say more!--Aarthi Vadde, E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English, Duke University
Tom Comitta's book is both a conceptual experiment and literary achievement. Poking fun at the notion of data-driven insight while exploiting data toward truly creative ends, this diptych of the "most wanted" and "most unwanted" books contains two fantastic novels--which you'll love to hate and hate to love. 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
People's Choice Literature is an unusual and brilliant book. In one respect, one entire novel consists of nothing but 'weaknesses' (paradoxically, for this reader, it is the more entertaining and valuable of the two). The other novel consists of nothing but dubious 'strengths.' Twinned together, they complete one another, offering a truly unique and unrepeatable form of critical and practical 'cultural intervention.'--Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel