The Newspaper That Recommended Ten Books Nobody Wrote

On May 18, 2025, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a 64-page summer supplement called "Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer." Inside it, a reading list. Fifteen titles, each attributed to a recognizable author. Isabel Allende. Percival Everett, fresh off winning the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Andy Weir. Min Jin Lee.

Only five of the fifteen titles on the list are real.

The other ten were invented and printed with the confidence of a section that had never once doubted itself. Readers who went looking for Isabel Allende's "Tidewater Dreams", described as her first climate fiction novel, a multigenerational saga, found nothing, because Allende never wrote it. Readers hunting for Percival Everett's "The Rainmakers," billed as a near-future story set in the American West, found the same emptiness. Everett didn't write that one either, Pulitzer or no Pulitzer.

Min Jin Lee found out the way most authors find out things now: on the internet, tagged in a post about a book she'd apparently written called "Nightshade Market." She replied on X with the calm precision of someone who has had this exact non-conversation before: "I have not written and will not be writing a novel called 'Nightshade Market.' Thank you."

The rest of the invented shelf reads like a fake syllabus assembled by someone who'd absorbed every author's brand without reading a single book. Andy Weir got "The Last Algorithm." Brit Bennett got "Hurricane Season." Taylor Jenkins Reid got "The Collector's Piece." Rumaan Alam got "The Longest Day." Delia Owens got "Salt and Honey." Rebecca Makkai got "Boiling Point." Maggie O'Farrell got "Migrations", a title that turned out to be someone else's work. It largely matched the real debut novel of a different author entirely, Charlotte McConaghy, with O'Farrell's name stapled onto the cover instead.

That detail is worth sitting with. The machine took the shape of something real, an actual novel with an actual premise, and reattached it to the wrong name, confidently, the way a forger copies a signature stroke for stroke without knowing whose hand it belonged to.

The mechanism

The list carried no byline. The person who eventually put his name to it was Marco Buscaglia, a Chicago-based freelance writer working for King Features, a Hearst unit that syndicates content to papers across the country. Buscaglia owned it. He explained it, which is somehow worse.

"Stupidly, and 100% on me, I just kind of republished this list that [an AI program] spit out," he said. To NPR, he went further: "Huge mistake on my part and has nothing to do with the Sun-Times. They trust that the content they purchase is accurate and I betrayed that trust. It's on me 100 percent."

He told Snopes he'd likely used a mix of the popular chatbots for the piece and wasn't entirely sure which tool had produced the final list. That uncertainty is its own small horror. A man cannot say for certain which chatbot invented the books he put his professional name behind, because by the time he republished the output, the seams didn't show.

This is the part that matters beyond the book world. A language model asked for a summer reading list predicts what a plausible entry looks like, given an author's name and reputation, and it produces something book-shaped every time, whether or not a book exists to match it. Fluency is free. A publication date and a one-line pitch that sounds exactly like every real jacket-copy summary you've ever skimmed come standard. Whether the book was ever written is nobody's job inside the machine. Buscaglia asked it for a list and it gave him one. It never once said "I don't know."

It got worse

The reading list was the visible wound. The Sun-Times' own newsroom went back and reviewed the full 64-page section afterward, and the reading list turned out to be the least of it.

The section had run ten stories built around named, quotable sources. The newsroom fact-checked all ten and found every one riddled with invented quotes and sources who don't appear to exist.

One story quoted chef Alice Waters on cooking without an oven, citing a 2023 Food & Wine interview. Waters' own executive assistant said she never gave that quote and was never interviewed for the piece at all. A separate "hammock boom" story quoted a purported Eagles Nest Outfitters product manager named Ryan Leidecker, the company said no one by that name works there, and a Dr. Jennifer Campos, described as a University of Colorado professor of leisure studies. The university had no record of her either. An entire feature story, built on people who, as far as anyone can tell, were never in a room to be interviewed.

The reading list was the one error that happened to involve authors famous enough to notice.

What it cost

King Features terminated its relationship with Buscaglia, saying his undisclosed use of AI violated a strict company policy against AI-generated content: "We regret this incident and are working with the handful of publishing partners who acquired this supplement." The same "Heat Index" supplement had also run in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which described its own 56-page version as containing AI-generated material that was fabricated, false or misleading, a remarkably clinical way to describe a summer reading list.

The Sun-Times pulled the edition from its digital and e-paper editions and said print subscribers wouldn't be charged for it, notable, given the paper typically adds a $3 surcharge for these special sections, of which it runs about ten a year. Victor Lim, spokesperson for parent company Chicago Public Media, spoke to the fallout. CEO Melissa Bell confirmed the list "recommended books that do not exist" and said the company was still investigating the rest of the section.

The Sun-Times Guild, representing the paper's editorial staff, was blunter. "We're deeply disturbed that AI-generated content was printed alongside our work," the union said, coining a phrase that deserves to outlive the story itself: slop syndication.

The timing did the story no favors. The fake reading list ran two months after the Sun-Times announced that 20% of its staff had accepted buyouts amid financial hardship at its nonprofit owner. A newsroom that had just shed a fifth of its people had, in the same season, licensed 64 pages of content that nobody on staff had verified. The paper itself called it "a learning moment for all of journalism that our work is valued because of the relationship our very real, human reporters and editors have with our audiences", true, and also the kind of sentence that only gets written after the fact.

404 Media broke the story first. Snopes later rated the whole thing, plainly: True.

The 2am version

Nobody at King Features set out to invent Isabel Allende's bibliography. Buscaglia asked a chatbot for a reading list, the chatbot gave him one, and he moved it downstream without opening a single page to check. The work looked finished. It read like a reading list. It had authors and one-line pitches, the whole costume, and underneath the costume, ten of the fifteen books had never existed at all.

That trap belongs to anyone who cites a source they didn't personally verify, a student who asks a model for reading material and trusts the output because it looks exactly like every real citation they've ever seen. The format is indistinguishable. The content underneath it is optional.

Min Jin Lee found out because she has a public account and a following large enough that someone tagged her within hours. Most fabricated sources get caught slower, and quieter. They sit in a bibliography, footnoted and unquestioned, until someone downstream goes looking for "Nightshade Market" and finds an empty shelf where a book should be.

The boring fix is the same one that would have saved Buscaglia a very bad week: check the source against the live record before you hand anything in. Does the book exist. Did that author write it. Is the paper you're citing actually sitting where you say it's sitting, saying what you claim it says. It's a boring question. It's also the only one that would have stopped this story from happening.