Why You Should Read More Fiction: What Data and AI Tell Us About the Value of Storytelling

Why human storytelling matters: the science behind attention, memory, and connection. How do the stories we read shape the ways we think, perceive, and navigate the world?In this ambitious and timely book, Andrew Piper argues that fiction is far more than entertainment.Stories cultivate attention, perspective, and embodied understanding in ways increasingly vital to modern life. Piper is the director of McGill University's ".txtlab," a digital humanities laboratory that uses AI and computational modeling to study how storytelling works.Rather than using AI to generate fiction, Piper employs these tools to analyze patterns across thousands of novels, folk tales, fan-fiction archives, and works of contemporary global literature.By translating elements of narrative-characters, emotions, objects, behaviors, social relationships, and points of view-into measurable features, his lab can identify patterns that no individual reader could easily detect through ordinary reading alone.Across thes