There's something growing through the cracks of contemporary literature, and it refuses to be trimmed back.
Look at this week's literary conversation and you'll notice a recurring restlessness — a fascination with things that won't stay in their assigned place. An invasive blackberry vine that swallowed the Pacific Northwest. A fire horse year that promises to burn away old patterns. A novelist who insists that fiction is not a machine, no matter how many critics try to engineer it into one. These aren't random coincidences. They're symptoms of a larger shift in how we think about stories, nature, and the limits of human control.
The JSTOR Daily piece on the Himalayan blackberry is, on the surface, a natural history story. But read it alongside Walter Mosley's essay in Literary Hub — where he pushes back hard against critics who treat novels like finely tuned mechanical systems — and something interesting emerges. Both are fundamentally about the hubris of trying to engineer living things into efficiency.