3 Nobel laureates are among the writers urging France to resume evacuations from Gaza.

By Dan Sheehan

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September 16, 2025, 2:15pm

Nobel Laureates Annie Ernaux, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and J.M.G. Le Clézio are among a group of twenty prominent writers who have signed a public letter to President Emmanuel Macron urging the immediate resumption of France’s evacuation program for Palestinian scholars, artists, and writers in Gaza.

Since its founding in 2017, the PAUSE program has provided visas and institutional support to hundreds of at-risk scholars and artists from conflict zones around the world, including Palestine. Significantly, the program allows Palestinian laureates from Gaza to continue their work while preserving their right to return to Palestine, as they would be arriving on talent visas and not as refugees.

The letter condemns the French government’s suspension of PAUSE and related evacuations from Gaza following a single case in which a student admitted to Sciences Po Lille was accused of sharing antisemitic statements. On 1 August 2025, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot declared that “no evacuation of any kind” would take place until further notice, a decision which left many approved applicants and their families—already accepted by French institutions—stranded amid famine and bombardment.

“Suspending a humanitarian program on the basis of one case amounts to collective punishment,” the signatories write, stressing that France must uphold its humanist commitments while Palestinians face what the UN and almost every major human rights group in the world has described as a genocide. They argue that PAUSE, while limited, remains one of the few existing lifelines and protects not only individuals but Palestinian cultural and intellectual life, threatened by the deliberate destruction of universities, schools, and cultural centers.

Other signatories of the letter include Alain Damasio, Mathias Énard, Anne Enright, Didier Eribon, Isabella Hammad, Kapka Kassabova, Karim Kattan, Rashid Khalidi, Naomi Klein, Deborah Levy, Édouard Louis, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Max Porter, Sally Rooney, Leïla Slimani, and Madeleine Thien.

The writers urge Macron to lift the suspension immediately and restore PAUSE as a model of protection for endangered voices. “We hope that France can follow through on its proclaimed humanist values,” they write, “and that the French government will make the right choice and resume PAUSE.”

Good news! Harper’s Bazaar is launching a literary newsletter.

By Brittany Allen

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September 16, 2025, 11:33am

For the next eight weeks, Harper’s Bazaar will sponsor a new literary newsletter from Kaitlyn Greenidge.

Greenidge, the novelist behind Libertie and We Love You, Charlie Freeman and the excellent thinker behind pieces like these, isn’t new to the newsletter game. Her own Substack, “What It is I Think I’m Doing,” has been serving up “cultural criticism at the intersection of pop culture, the archives and Black womanhood” for the past five years.

Her Harper’s letter (yes, let this be a reclaiming) will go a little more local.

In every issue of “A Closer Read,” Greenidge will highlight a single book. Early pieces promise to look at “writing as embroidery with Joyce Carol Oates, the wonders of taxidermy with Susan Orlean, and Angela Flournoy’s modern classic of Black millennial angst, The Wilderness.”

As the Substack model continues to balloon, major publications like Harper’s Bazaar are going all in on newsletters. “A Closer Read” joins a raft of compadres, like The New Yorker’s sturdy “Books and Culture” vertical, or The Point’s philosophical “Forms of Life.”

The Cut re-launched a fun literary letter last October. “Book Gossip” aims to “track reading trends and controversies, highlight great works in translation,” and “point you to the writing making waves on the internet.” Edited by Jasmine Vojdani, it’s aimed at both publishing insiders and general readers.

Happily, Greenidge’s project is even more specific than all of these. “A Closer Read” will occupy a fresh intersection in newsletterland—at least as it’s been done so far by large publications. By focusing on a single book or idea, each letter can sit somewhere between a personal essay and a larger lit-world analysis. And as any librarian or bookseller can tell you, meeting new books through one specific voice has always been the best way to do it.

Greenidge puts her aims even more humbly. Describing an ill-fated attempt to imitate art, she instructs fans to “think of this newsletter as a toast to the curiosity and literary joys that might lead you to order a Scotch and milk, in a dark and musty bar, to try to get closer to what you read and loved on a page.”

Sounds pretty sweet to me.

Today you can read the very first edition of “A Closer Read,” featuring an interview with Arundhati Roy about her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. New installments will land every Tuesday.

The curious can sign up here.

Samantha Schweblin! Lydia Davis! Angela Flournoy! 21 new books out today.

By Julia Hass

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September 16, 2025, 4:44am

As summer gives way to fall—cooler nights, busier days—there are more opportunities to be present, to be deliberate, to be enmeshed in the dailiness of one’s life. All of which means… more time for books! And we have a great haul this week, as ever, including debut novels by Sam Sussman and Angela Flournoy, a memoir about deafness and voice by Rachel Kolb, and a history of the constitution by none other than Jill Lepore. There’s a primer on the long history of conflict between Israel and Palestine, a new guide to birding, and a creative memoir by Lydia Davis. The three going to the top of my list: Sam Sussman, Angela Flournoy, and Kate Zambreno.

Happy Tuesday, and enjoy the new bounty!

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Kate Zambreno, Animal Stories
(Transit)

“Zambreno’s lucid writing and relentless inquisitiveness shine.”
—Publishers Weekly

Samanta Schweblin, trans. by Megan McDowell, Good and Evil and Other Stories
(Knopf)

“No one writes like Samanta Schweblin. Her narratives are sui generis—wonderfully unpredictable and invitingly strange.”
—Lorrie Moore

Sam Sussman, Boy From the North Country
(Penguin Press)

“A debut novel of rare power, a page-turning story of a son learning to return to his mother’s transformative love. Tragic and redemptive, poetic and provocative, this novel held me breathless at every turn. Sussman is a writer of many gifts.”
—Maria Semple

Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising
(Pantheon)

“In a project undertaken at great personal risk, the authors’ compiled historical context, frank personal reflection, and conscientious recordkeeping constitute a critically important ‘first rough draft’ of a significant moment being ignored in real time … Personally driven, historically necessary, and politically salient.”
—Kirkus

John T. Edge, House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home
(Crown)

“John T. Edge refuses to allow himself or the reader the comfort of spectacle here. He does that Mississippi work and creates a lush, self-reflexive Southern monument that will last forever.”
—Kiese Laymon

Robin Allison Davis, Surviving Paris: A Memoir of Healing in the City of Light
(Amistad)

“[Davis] has persisted, determined to survive and thrive in a place she has grown to love. A frank chronicle of pain and hard-won recovery.”
—Kirkus

Rachel Kolb, Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice
(Ecco)

“Accessible, fascinating, and heartfelt, this thorough examination of contemporary Deafness moves and edifies in equal measure. It’s required reading.”
—Publishers Weekly

Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness 
(Mariner)

“Angela Flournoy is singular in how she renders the complicated solidarity that exists between friends. In The Wilderness, there is deep tenderness, room for the grayer areas of experience, for contradiction, ambivalence and the right to be lost.”
—Raven Leilani

Jane Eisner, Carole King: She Made the Earth Move
(Yale University Press)

“A robust celebration of a legendary musician.”
—Publishers Weekly

Ali McNamara, Right Place, Right Time
(Bloomsbury)

“An intriguing, luminous romance.”
—Woman’s Weekly

Elie Honig, When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ’s Pursuit of the President, from Nixon to Trump
(Harper)

“A fascinating, fast-paced insider’s account of the trials and tribulations of the nation’s highest-stakes cases from Watergate to today. In this riveting, deeply reported book, Honig offers unique historical insight and a timely and important look at the future of presidential accountability.”
—Anderson Cooper

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine
(FSG)

“Beautifully written . . . [Agha and Malley are] two people who have genuinely distinct perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and who have been in the room … A great book.”
—Chris Hayes

Jacinda Townsend, Trigger Warning
(Graywolf)

“A prescient and powerful work that pushes us towards a deeper understanding of ourselves—it’s a fantastic read.”
—S.A. Cosby,

Katharina Volckmer, Calls May Be Recorded
(Two Dollar Radio)

“This book is filled with brilliant dialogue, unexpected turns, some very dirty talk with sudden bursts of hilarity, and then fierce sadness. It exudes dark energy. It is highly original. It gives pleasure on every page.”
—Colm Tóibín

Anne Sebba, The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival
(St. Martin’s Press)

“A vivid account of the experiences of the 40 or so women who briefly came together to make the music that saved their lives. Running through this fine book is Sebba’s empathy for the impossible moral choices presented to these young women.”
—The Guardian

Adam Nicolson, Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood
(FSG)

“Elegant and involving. Like one of the nests Nicolson finds on his property, it’s been deftly assembled.”
—The Observer

Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in ’90s New York City
(Grand Central)

“A wondrous snapshot of a bygone New York.”
—Publishers Weekly

Mary Roach, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy
(W. W. Norton)

“We are all replaceable to some degree or another…with the exception of Mary Roach. There is no one and nothing like her—singular, bizarre, dedicated, passionate, fascinating. Her writing traffics at the unusual intersection of science, storytelling, and humor.”
—Jason Alexander

Anika Fajardo, The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore
(Gallery Books)

“Anika Fajardo’s charming and poignant new book is a map of loss, motherhood, and magic that welcomes the reader home. There are tender revelations, vivid details and funny moments throughout.”
—Chantal Acavedo

Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution
(Liveright)

“The noted historian advances the cause of an aggressively, and progressively, malleable set of rules for government … With the Constitution under daily threat, Lepore’s outstanding book makes for urgent reading.”
—Kirkus

Lydia Davis, Into the Weeds
(Yale University Press)

“Intimate revelations, delicately conveyed.”
—Kirkus

Arthur Sze is the new U.S. Poet Laureate.

By James Folta

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September 15, 2025, 12:39pm

The Library of Congress just announced that Arthur Sze will be the nation’s 25th Poet Laureate for 2025-2026. He will take over the position on October 9th from the previous Laureate Ada Limón, who served for two, two-year terms.

Sze is a poet, translator, and editor, and the author of twelve books of poetry. He writes often about the Southwest, where he’s lived for years. Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Randolph Newlen describes his work as full of “great formal innovation” and that “like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Sze forges something new from a range of traditions and influences – and the result is a poetry that moves freely throughout time and space.”

We’ve published a few of Sze’s poems on Lit Hub over the years, including “Unpacking a Globe” from his National Book Award winning collection Sight Lines. He was also named as the first poet laureate of Santa Fe and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for his book Compass Rose.

In the announcement of his appointment, Sze said, “As the son of Chinese immigrants, and as a sophomore who decided to leave MIT to pursue a dream of becoming a poet, I never would have guessed that so many decades later I would receive this recognition.”

What does the Poet Laureate do? Pretty much whatever they want; the position is open to the interpretation of each individual poet. The Library instructs the Laureate “to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry” but doesn’t specify how, choosing to keep “to a minimum the specific duties required.” Traditionally, Laureates curate readings and symposia, but in recent years, Laureates have gotten more creative and also launched specific projects, like Joy Harjo’s “Living Nations, Living Words” which collected and mapped First Peoples Poetry, and Juan Felipe Herrera’s “La Casa de Colores”, which included collectively written, epic poems.

We’ll have to see what Sze will do during his tenure, but he’s said that he “feels a great responsibility to promote the ways poetry, especially poetry in translation, can impact our daily lives. We live in such a fast-paced world: poetry helps us slow down, deepen our attention, connect and live more fully.” Translation has been a core part of Sze’s practice, including a collection of his own translations of Chinese poems called The Silk Dragon II. I’m hopeful he’ll bring this passion for other traditions of writing into the role.

I’m also glad to see such an excellent choice by the Library of Congress, which has recently been a target of Trump and his hogmen—I was afraid this year’s Laureate would be someone like Kid Rock.

Congratulations to Arthur Sze! He will inaugurate his tenure with a live reading on his first day, October 9th, and you can reserve tickets for free starting this Thursday at loc.gov.

This week’s news in Venn diagrams.

By James Folta

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September 12, 2025, 1:59pm

Fridays, the week’s mullet: business in the front, and leisure in the back.

Hope you have a great weekend, with your loved ones and your community, and I’ll see you back here on Monday.