Sign up to receive it in your inbox. Your story in this week's issue, " Predictions and Presentiments," is drawn from your forthcoming book, " Beginning Middle End," which is coming out in July. The audio version will incorporate sounds that you and your team recorded in Sicily, where both the piece and the novel are set. How would you compare the creative processes of writing and recording, and the experiences of reading and listening? Recording sound and listening attentively have been an integral part of my writing process for a long time now.

I read an article the other day about a computer program that writes fiction. You feed it a few lines, tell it the genre – science fiction, horror – and it produces the rest. It writes in full grammatical sentences; comes up with metaphors and analogies; emulates a writer's particular style and so on. The author of the article, who seemed a little too thrilled about the existence of this diabolical toy from the depths of Silicon Valley says, at some point, that this "tool" was going to be the "salvation" for writers who dislike writing, which, according to him, is nearly all writers. I want to say to this writer: you are wrong. And to this robot that writes fiction I want to say … well I don't want to say anything to it because, you know, robots are robots.