We Computers

"This National Book Award finalist, an exuberant homage to all forms of translation and reinvention, is replete with infinite mirror effects. AI, its first-person plural narrator, is a Scheherazade-like computer program taught to analyze and generate literature. AI’s creator and rival, Jon Perse, a French poet and Lacan-trained psychologist, in turn acquires an extensive knowledge of Persian poetry from his Uzbek translator and colleague, Abdulhamid Ismail, whose initials are also AI – and whose name can be found overlapping the author Hamid Ismailov’s – suggesting that the computer program, its programmer, the Uzbek translator and the book’s real author are all intrinsically connected or reflected by their alternate selves."