A novelist says he is bombarded with fan mail nearly every day, with multi‑paragraph messages arriving from supposed readers in cities including Barcelona, Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw. According to the Guardian, the emails carry appealing names such as Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose and Tricia Claxton, while one sender signs off with “warm chaos.” Some messages praise the “deadpan genius” of his novels, while others admire his nonfiction’s “moral courage.” The author says every one of these messages is entirely fake—the writers are not real readers but scammers using generative AI to create highly personalized notes that bypass spam filters and land directly in his inbox. The scammers promise to promote his work at city‑wide book clubs or spread the word among reading communities, but only if he transfers a few hundred dollars to cover costs. He notes that most writers he knows receive a steady stream of similar emails, prompting questions about whether any real person could feel so strongly about their work—or whether the giveaway is that the sender claims to have read every book. The Guardian reported that when the novelist decided to write back and accept one sender’s offer to find him new readers, the story took an unexpected turn.
Source: The Guardian.
