What it feels like to work with Mythos — Claude Fable represents another big jump in AI
Famous Men — He doesn’t remember me, but I know who he is. The biographer and I met at a party Nathaniel took me to about a year after I arrived in New York, a literary fundraiser at one of those apartments whe…
How Love Comes to You — We spend our days making plans, making promises, making predictions about the possible, and yet the most bewildering thing about life is that its imagination is always greater than that of the livi…
Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0 - Lightspeed Magazine — You take a shortcut through the hydroponics bay on your way to work, and notice that the tomato plants are covered in tiny crawling insects that…
Shakespeare and Reality Televison Really Aren’t That Different — When the first massively popular reality TV shows hit the air in the early 2000s, I remember thinking in my naïveté: Surely this is just a passing fad. I was entering my teens and, like so many clo…
AI Job Grief: The Unnamed Psychological Crisis Hitting Tech Workers — Across hundreds of Reddit threads and a small body of clinical literature, AI-driven displacement is producing an emotional category that most closely resembles grief, and the institutions causing it have no la
GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities — GLM-5.3 can autonomously build end-to-end cyber exploits, but unlike other frontier models, it was released without meaningful safeguards to limit misuse.
Lit Hub Daily: September 23, 2026 — Laura Kolbe on the poetics of subverting linear time and the derangement of “having an intimate, almost sensual relationship to the clock.” | Lit Hub Craft Sasha Dovzhyk recommends esse…
The Stoic Key to Living with Presence: Seneca on Time Spent vs. Saved vs. Wasted — “Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing… is ours, except time.”
Chris Rock Has Been Thinking About Forgiveness — The comedian and filmmaker on what real friendship looks like, what keeps him up at night and his new movie, “Misty Green.”
Why We Still Need Steven Spielberg — Hollywood is struggling, but Spielberg insists that the big screen is still the best place to work out our collective dreams, fears, joys and sorrows.
What Learning to Paint and Reading The Elements of Style Have in Common — I envy painters the freedom to convey thoughts without words. So much so that at one difficult stretch in my life I resolved to give up writing and pick up a paint brush. It wasn’t that I supposed …
The Time Johnny Cash Almost Started a Prison Riot at San Quentin — “I think this is a very important thing: to give a man some hope in prison, to give a man some encouragement to be a better citizen while he is there and if he is a better citizen, while he i…
The First Reviews of The Catcher in the Rye — “I was surrounded by phonies… They were coming in the goddam window.” * Seventy-five years ago today, The Catcher in the Rye first hit bookshelves across the US, and people still have some pretty s…
Claire Fuller on Taking Writing Lessons from Sculpting — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I’d been sculpting and drawing since I was sixteen but when, at forty, I started writing short stories and novels, all my …
HP's MacBook Neo competitor is $699 with an OLED display and plenty of catches — The PC market was caught flat-footed by Apple’s MacBook Neo launch earlier this year, and while that laptop’s aggressive pricing...
Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI? — Booksellers are reporting mysterious bulk orders. It's thought the books are being used to train AI - and ending up pulped.
“Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Friendship — “Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions.”
“The Figure a Poem Makes,” a Poem by Donna Masini — It’s a slow start. Notice the way she’s holding the pen. Four-beat line to open, leaning blue, and—synesthesia—right at the jump. If she can shift to the conditional—yes! She lands clean on an …
Home — THE JOURNEY Journey of the Human Mind Our Prehistoric Ancestors The Evolution of Language Ideas that Shaped Our Modern World Tools & the Development of Contemporary Society Our Mind in the Modern World Global Issues and Our Future A Sustainable Planet The Changing World Ec
The Newer World — My father Chas Bouguereau upped sticks some sixty years ago and left Louisiana and settled himself in Paris, a small town in Tennessee. It was 1840. A wiser man would have pushed on to the Ohio. A …
Jamaica Kincaid! Eimear McBride! 19 books out in paperback this August. — August, amazingly, approaches, the final month in a summer that has at once felt slow and like it has slipped by with the curious swiftness of a half-remembered dream. Still, the summer is not over…
Sheila Liming: “The End of Books” — A university professor on what we lose when we lose the book as a physical medium.
The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction — Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. …
Blackie & Co.: A Blackbird’s Lesson in Friendship — In the middle of my bleakest winter, my friend Andrea gave me a battered copy of a forgotten book from her elderly father’s used bookshop in rural Texas, by a man named Hockley Clarke. I inhaled it…
Dostoyevsky isn’t difficult — Other than the names. The names are difficult.
The Creative Power of Uncertainty: Polish Poet Wisława Szymborska’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech — “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”
For People with Misophonia, Everyday Noises Can Be Agony — The neurophysiological disorder is characterized by a severe aversion to sound—and the struggle to convince others of the severity of that aversion.
Rachel Syme Loves a Good Yarn — Welcome to Season Four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer theyR…
How World War I Foretold Our Current Age of Competing Nationalisms — Close to Thiepval, a small French village in Picardy with about a hundred inhabitants, stands one of the most poignant memorials to the millions killed in World War I. More than fifty meters tall, …
Speaking for the Dead - Longreads — A New York Times veteran considers the art of the obituary and how words give shape to legacies.
Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island — “These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.”
How Jane Austen Blew a Hole Through the Romance Genre She Created — The most dramatic moment in Jane Austen’s Emma, and, arguably, in her whole body of work, has nothing to do with romance. After all, Emma Woodhouse’s reaction to George Knightley’…
Adam Johnson, Muriel Spark, bardic rivalry… and 25 more books out in paperback this September. — September is here, and with it comes a bevy of new books. Below, you’ll find twenty-five delightful reads to consider, each in a fresh paperback edition, including debuts, sophomore…
How to Be Successful in Life — Wondering how to be successful in life and get ahead of 99% of people? Here are three things you must do, and some downsides to consider.
Girls’ Girl — By Friday, I was back at Margaret’s house with an itchiness between us. I found her to be too pleased with herself. She flitted around her room with authority and half an eye on her phone at all ti…
The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought — In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist n
Annie Dillard and the Writing Life - Longreads — "Writers aren’t born, they’re made—from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage."
What is happening to publishing? — Literature's new AI scandal and why good non-fiction books will always matter
The Voice of Google — I cracked the code for generating corpspeak with personality. Then I lost faith in what the company was selling.
How Raising a Multilingual Tot Helped Me Write a Multicultural Novel — When he was three, my son often said his heart was wounded. The reasons for these heart wounds were varied: someone didn’t want to be his best friend; I accidentally swept his latest artistic maste…
Bolsonaro’s First-Round Lead Sets Brazil Assets for Monday Surge — Brazilian assets are set to jump after Senator Flávio Bolsonaro came in ahead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the first round of elections, a far better showing than investors were positioned for.
How to Put an End to Problem of American Gerontocracy (in the Nicest Possible Way) — A dynamic and innovative society, focused most on launching people into the prime of their lives, depends on taking good care of those aging out of it—if only to keep the threat of gerontocracy…
Sarah Anderson on Relief from Intrusive Thoughts — The author discusses her story “Dark Horse.”
A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How a Forgotten Medieval Woman Gave Groups of Birds Their Strange Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith — Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what…
“Laugh? I Thought I’d Die!!”: Richard Yates’s Unpublished Letters — "Here’s this month’s alimony, with all my love."
The 13 Best Book Covers of May — Another month of books, another month of book covers. This month, despite the spring of it all, my favorite covers were strange and dark, their meanings obscure. Is it my mood, or the designersR…
How Do You Write a “Mighty Book” in 2026? — “To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme,” Herman Melville writes in Moby-Dick. In the US, one of the mightiest for the past generation has been the shift from a society dominated b…
On Losing a Parent — We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life &…
UK charities launch Venezuela earthquakes appeal — At least 1,700 people have died and tens of thousands are feared missing after the twin quakes.
'Club Kid' review: Jordan Firstman reimagines 'Big Daddy' with a subversive wit — From "I Love LA" to a New York City fairytale, this queer comedian has us seated.
AI is making development faster. But where did the work go? — <p>When AI makes one part of product development faster, what happens to the rest of the system?</p> <br/><br/>
Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks — The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states may use the federal SAVE database to verify voter citizenship, reversing lower court decisions ahead of the midterm elections.
Could Data Centers Swing an Election in Wisconsin? — As A.I. becomes increasingly unpopular among voters, the politics of data centers are scrambling political lines across the country—including in a tight race for the Wisconsin governor’s mansion.
Wellington second-hand bookstore’s mysterious orders — Book Haven in Wellington's Newtown started to receive more orders than it could possibly handle.
Explore a rare collection of LGBTQ+ children’s books dating back to 1969. — The Mechanics’ Institute, one of the oldest cultural institutions on the West Coast, is now home to a thrilling archive of LGBTQ+ children’s literature. The Tarpey-Schwed LGBT Families …
Lit Hub Daily: July 14, 2026 — “I usually just write my way into things.” Eric Olson profiles Sigrid Nunez on the release of her collection, It Will Come Back to You. | Lit Hub Craft Angela Flournoy explores why Jean…
Reports - Watchdog eyes NIL violations at 5-10 Power 4 schools — The College Sports Commission is looking into possible rules violations at between five and 10 Power 4 schools regarding payments to players, according to multiple reports.
Inner Space, Outer Space, and How to Be an Astronaut in the Cosmos of Connection: Eric Berne on the Key to True Intimacy — “A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity.”
On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran — “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself… You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. …