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  • Featured

    How Talking About Death Helps Us Live a Fuller Life

    E.K. Schrader on Ten Years Without Max Ritvo

  • Featured

    Claudia Rankine on Triage, Antigone, and Collapse

    In Conversation with Christian Barter, Jennifer Maritza McCauley and Whitney Terrell on Fiction/Non/Fiction

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    How Ursula K. Le Guin Channeled Her Environmentalism Into Fiction

    Shelley Streeby on the Ecologies That Inspired the Science Fiction Author's Body of Work

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    On Grief and Growing Up in
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The Latest

Jeff Jarvis on Mark Twain, America’s First Celebrity Author and Publisher

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A Literary Haunting: What the Ghost of Sylvia Plath Taught Me About Grief

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The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

  • Here’s what’s making us happy this week.

  • Tony Tulathimutte has won one America’s largest (and newest) literary prizes.

  • Here’s the winner of the 2026 Inside Literary Prize.

  • Joby Warrick, LaToya Watkins, Katy Simpson Smith, and more: 20 new books out today!

  • Now Amazon is destroying rare books to train its AI.

  • The Rumpus is launching a Spanish-language magazine.

  • Fall book clubs to join based on your personality type.

  • There is now an archive of eulogies given by Palestinian journalists to their martyred colleagues.

  • This interactive atlas captures more than a thousand literary journeys.

  • Téa Obreht, Richard Russo, Claire Carusillo, and more: 20 new books out today!

  • Paul Yoon, Meaghan Beatley, Claudia Rankine, and more: 22 new books out today!

  • Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy is coming to a screen near you.

What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

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Ways of Connecting: On Writing That Marries the Psychological, the Personal and the Political

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In Praise of “Wordy, Old Prose.” (Or, F*ck Your AI Reading Buddy)

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How Orchids Inspired the Groundbreaking Work of Charles Darwin

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What Does “Progress” Mean, Anyway?

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  • Unprecedented Times
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Your
Daily Fiction

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction

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The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Nonfiction

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How Accusations Against Black Academics Point to the Real End of “Woke 1.0”

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The Submitters: On the Literary Economy of Unreadness

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Did Smartphones Really Kill Reading?

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On Women and The Water Cure: Nine Memoirs About Wild Swimming

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Crime Reads

Crime Reads

August 21, 2026

The Best Crimey Short Story Collections in Recent Years

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What do Norman Mailer and Charles Dickens Have in Common?

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10 New Books Coming Out This Week

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The Best Paperback Releases of the Month: August 2026

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Book Marks

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5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Read an Original Review of All the King’s Men on Its 80th Anniversary

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How Octavia Butler Encouraged Me to Write My Novel

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Am I the Asshole For Abandoning My First Love, Fantasy?

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Russian Literature Does Not Belong to the Russian State

By Katherine Kelaidis

On the Carceral Ideology Underpinning the Anti-Trans Movement

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As Hitler Loomed, Hannah Arendt Undertook a Deep Analysis of German Antisemitism

By Thomas Meyer

From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity

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As Hitler Loomed, Hannah Arendt Undertook a Deep Analysis of German Antisemitism

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Eight Books to Read If You’re Still Thinking About the Roman Empire

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  • Lit Hub Daily

    August 21, 2026

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