“Dreams in Nightmares” Turns the Art Life Political — Struggles for personal and creative freedom fuel Shatara Michelle Ford’s second feature, about three women’s search for a friend gone missing.
László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails — The Nobel laureate on his notoriously long sentences, our estrangement from beauty, and why he would “never voluntarily reread” one of his books.
Inside America's Shoplifting Lab - Longreads — "In the war on 'shrink,' big retailers are turning to one Florida outfit to study shoppers and prevent them from stealing. I went there—and saw far too much."
Lit Hub Daily: June 16, 2026 — Sophie Lewis examines the phenomenon of heterofatalism. | Lit Hub Politics If you want a job as an astronaut, you need to nail the interview. | Lit Hub Memoir Erin Maglaque contextualizes her own e…
Danny McBride Is Not Above a Little Violence (or a Lot of It) — The writer and actor, known for his profane comedic antiheroes, likes to find universal truths in human flaws.
Book Prizes Don't Work How You Think — all the beans that's fit to spill
P.C. Verrone Recommends Essential Texts of Afro-Surrealism — I was introduced to the term “Afro-Surrealism” through an interview in which Phillip B. Williams called it his preferred way to describe his novel Ours. The phrase was coined by Amiri Baraka in 197…
Fun fact: Salvador Dalí designed a tarot deck for the film Live and Let Die. — In the early 1970s, the producer Albert R. Broccoli commissioned the artist Salvador Dalí to make a tarot deck for the upcoming James Bond film Live and Let Die. Based on Ian Fleming’s 1954 n…
Sonia Feldman Recommends Books About the Thrilling Dynamics of Girls’ Friendship — Internet rumor holds that manga artist Naoko Takeuchi created the beloved classic Sailor Moon about a group of girls she wished were her friends because she was lonely. Memes periodically circulate
The Literary Film & TV You Need to Stream in August — Every month, all the major streaming services add a host of newly acquired (or just plain new) shows, movies, and documentaries into their ever-rotating libraries. So what’s a dedicated reader to w…
Lit Hub Daily: August 13, 2026 — S. Lamble explores the conservative, Christian, and ultra-nationalist roots of the global anti-trans movement. | Lit Hub Politics From Hinge to Feeld, dating apps are moving into the literary space…
the OED has a whole section for words that appear in exactly one book ever written. some of them are pretty good
The Electability of Abdul El-Sayed — The former public-health official won Michigan’s Democratic primary with an unapologetically progressive platform—and a total defiance of the Party establishment.
Celebrating 60 years of Notting Hill Carnival — Crowds take to the streets of west London to enjoy family day in the bank holiday weekend sunshine.
Patrick Collison's reading list is half a CS degree disguised as recommendations. https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf
Vinyl in the Veins - Longreads — Behind the nostalgia lies an uncomfortable truth: Every record is made of oil.
Photographer spent decades shooting the same intersection in Tokyo. The before/afters show how a single corner transformed across seasons and decades.
There’s No Place Like Group Chats — My old friends and I have ended up scattered across different states, in different time zones, but we’ve made our own neighborhood inside the black and blue bubbles of our phones.
The Powerful Freedom of BDSM — The specific terminology varies across the world, but generally, BDSM is an umbrella term that reflects a wide range of erotic desires, behaviors, identities, relationships, and communities related…
Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) — 🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books…
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week — Paul Yoon’s Etna, Dave Zirin’s The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, and Chris Bohjalian’s The Amateur all feature among the best reviewed books of the w…
COMPULSION: The Writers Who Wrote The Most in History — I've been writing publicly every day for seven months, and I wanted to know what that looked like for other compulsive writers. From Chesterton dictating past midnight, to Chinese web fiction authors racing through 10,000…
Panama Canal to reduce shipping as ‘extreme’ El Nino approaches — Panama Canal will cut daily transits from 40 to 32 vessels by September 15, risking slower shipping and higher costs.
Five totally plausible reading trends to watch out for this summer. — What’s everyone reading this summer? No, better yet—what do we think everyone else will be reading? Is 2026 the season of the post-trauma plot? Are we reading big books, or novellas? Indoors …
Coco Gauff supports 'fairness' in WTA test, not 'animosity' — Coco Gauff said she supports "fairness in women's sports" but criticized how the WTA's gene testing creates "animosity towards the trans community."
Florentina Holzinger’s Naked Ambition — The artist’s extreme use of the body has caused viewers to puke, faint, and leave her shows. At the Venice Biennale, though, her vision has made her a star.
This Week in Literary History: America Turns 250 — This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. This week, the United States of America turns 250. It’s a milestone that brings mixed feelings at best, considering the re…
No Return - Longreads — "Did an experienced alpinist leave his girlfriend to die at the top of a mountain?"
What It’s Like to Interview For the Job of “Astronaut” — The following is from Leroy Chiao’s Dinner with an Astronaut, and describes one step in Chiao’s late 1980s journey to becoming astronaut. * What was the astronaut interview like? I flew to Houston …
Did American-Style ‘Gentle Parenting’ Spoil French Children? — As positive parenting takes over France, one psychologist’s call for a return to discipline has set off a furious debate.
The Art of Losing and the Art of Beckoning Love Back: The Story Behind One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written — You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But…
Why Does Roast Chicken Taste So Good? Inside the Science Behind the Flavors We Love — When we cook our favorite meals, what happens to the carbo-hydrates, proteins and fats? I confess I am a less-than-average cook, but God loves a trier. I remember being about 23 years old and tr
What’s in a Book’s Name? One Writer’s Journey to Finding the Perfect Title — For me, coming up with titles is always a team effort. Titling my first book, a quirky history of people who look for the Garden of Eden on Earth, had me stumped, until my friend the writer Josh Ga…
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. …
Data Centers: The Latest Thing to Destroy Beautiful West Virginia — The data centers have been speaking to me lately, in the form of ChatGPT slop. The spam offers to market my new novel for a fee, perverting the language I’ve written about a place the data centers …
Trump is being sued for charging for faster access to Truth Social posts — A new lawsuit claims the Truth API violates the First and Fifth Amendments.
A Culture of Collaboration: The Legacy of Lunigiana’s Traveling Booksellers — In certain borghi (small medieval villages) in Lunigiana several centuries ago, some impoverished mountain people, pushed by necessity, began climbing the arduous paths of the Apennines and then de…
The Tragedy of Loving Sylvia Plath — My Sylvia Plath fandom dates back to the early nineties, when I was in my late teens and randomly pulled The Bell Jar off the shelf at my local library in suburban Salt Lake City. I had never heard…
Let Maggie Gyllenhaal Adapt The Bell Jar, You Cowards — This essay began as a plea which turned out, as desires sometimes do, to be a little psychic (“That woman, I conjured her,” says Gwyneth Paltrow’s overwrought Plath in the failed 2003 biopic Sylvia…
The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother — “It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.”
Valeria Luiselli, Emilee Hackney, Annie Jacobsen, and more: 20 new books out today! — Rounding out the end of the month with some long-awaited arrivals: namely, Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli finally hits the shelves. We also have a riveting and raw memoir by Emilee…
Why is France so invested in the future of Lebanon? — Analysts say France is hoping to reassert its diminishing influence in the region.
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.’”
Engadget Podcast: Xbox resets with layoffs — This week on the Engadget Podcast, we dive into Microsoft's brutal Xbox layoffs with Mike Futter of the Virtual Economy Podcast.
June’s Best Reviewed Fiction — Maggie O’Farrell’s Land, Ann Patchett’s Whistler, and Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco all feature among the best reviewed fiction titles of the month. Brought to you by Book …
Elves Against Capitalism: How the Earth Liberation Front Came to America — The fires began with a gentle Midwestern boy who loved animals. Kevin Tubbs grew up in a comfortable suburb outside Omaha, Nebraska, in a canary-yellow ranch house filled with dogs. Tubbs’s mother,…
Insomnia and the Secret Life of Ideas: Kafka on the Relationship Between Sleeplessness and Creativity — Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining…
Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author — In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author…
Seven killed, including two police officers, in UK ‘wrong-side’ car crash — Accident follows similar crashes in Ireland where police highlighted social media trend driving in opposite direction.
10 Great Nonfiction Titles to Read This August — From the hard, hard courts of professional tennis to the mean screens of social media to the life and times of an iconic indie rock songwriter, this month has something for everyone. * Matthew Futt…
Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity — “The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.”
Lit Hub Daily: June 12, 2026 — If literacy is in decline, why are bookstores booming? “Bookstores are filling a social void.” | Lit Hub Bookstores Korean poets and their translators pair poetry collections with K-pop…
The Rise of Organized Retail Crime at Big Box Stores — <p>Shoplifting is just the tip of the iceberg.</p>
Claire Vaye Watkins on Writing a Love Letter to the Mojave Desert — The Mojave Desert is in Claire Vaye Watkins’s DNA. She was born in Bishop, four hours away from Tecopa, the town in Death Valley where her parents lived, which had no hospital, raised in Tecopa and…
Charles Brockden Brown Declares Independence — Frequently claimed to be the first novel published in the United States, the book begins with a religious iconoclast who spontaneously combusts while worshiping in a temple.
Tato Architects uses silver-painted ceilings to draw light into Kyoto home — <p>Skylights, an internal light well and silver-painted ceilings pull light deep into House in Shichiku, a home in Kyoto designed by local studio Tato Architects. Designed for a couple and their cat,…
Is the First-Person Narrator a Uniquely American Idea? — “I am an American, Chicago born,” begins Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, “and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first…
AI fraud costing victims millions of dollars — Deepfake scams are becoming harder to spot as criminals use AI to impersonate officials and public figures.
Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” — A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.
What I Learned from a Close Read of All of Colson Whitehead’s Work — Colson Whitehead is a transitional figure in literary history, one of the literati of the post-Toni Morrison era, trained at elite schools (Trinity School, Harvard), highly attuned to nuances of ra…