[AI] I asked Sonnet 5 to describe my literary taste.

My prompt: Describe my literary taste in a way I’d be able to tell my friends who ask.

You gravitate toward spare, unsentimental prose that doesn’t flinch — violence, moral ambiguity, and outsiders are all fair game (McCarthy, Capote, Carpenter). But you balance that grit with a real appetite for the surreal and fabulist (Bulgakov, Calvino, Cortázar), and a strong pull toward literature in translation — especially voices that don’t usually make the “canon” list in the US: Arabic (al-Sadawi, al-Suwaidi, Tag Elsir), Greek (Papadiamantis, Haviaras), Hungarian (Szabó), Catalan (Rodoreda). You like books about people on the margins — drifters, madwomen, murderers, dreamers — often rendered with a kind of dry, mythic distance rather than sentimentality. There’s also a countercultural streak (Miller, Robbins) and a taste for doomed or thwarted protagonists (Stoner, Butcher’s Crossing) alongside loud, maximalist comic novels (Confederacy of Dunces, Moravagine).

Short version for friends: “Stark American West and Southern Gothic, global literature in translation — especially Arabic, Greek, and Central European — with a soft spot for surrealism, outsiders, and unsentimental prose.”