[{"id":276594,"date":"2026-09-04T05:09:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276594"},"modified":"2026-09-04T06:31:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T10:31:33","slug":"how-to-get-over-the-hump-of-writing-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-to-get-over-the-hump-of-writing-sex\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Get Over the Hump of Writing Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

This first appeared in Lit Hub\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Craft of Writing\u00a0newsletter\u2014sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Only trouble is interesting, and what causes more trouble for us humans than our love lives? With love, we\u2019re leaping into the unknown, and it\u2019s thrilling, surprising, scary, overwhelming (and sometimes underwhelming and disappointing) all at once. Love is often unrequited, dangerous, or forbidden, and even when it\u2019s straightforward, there\u2019s still a story in it because we are mortal beings, hurtling toward an impending end, so at some point, we (or our beloved) will be left heartbroken; love\u2019s trouble always makes for a good story. There\u2019s a very successful publishing industry\u2014the romance novel\u2014dedicated to it.<\/p>\n

The trouble with writing about love, and its bedfellow, sex, is it\u2019s so elusive and mysterious that we often try to wrestle it into submission by assigning tired, old descriptions to it, or else we try to obfuscate what\u2019s really happening and we slap a euphemism onto it. This is why there are so many clich\u00e9s for love: Love is blind. Love at first sight. Love conquers all. Love makes the world go round. The problem is that these overused phrases say exactly nothing of this complex, mysterious emotion, which is why we must come up with new and strange ways of talking about love and lust. We may never be able to completely capture the complexities, but we must try.<\/p>\n

Pep Talk: Getting Over the Hump of Writing Sex
\n<\/strong>When I was about six or seven, I heard the word fuck<\/em> at school. I went home and asked my father what it meant. He said, \u201cIt means making love.\u201d Then he told me not to ask any more questions. Within a few days, a picture book was left out for me. Where Did I Come From?<\/em> by Peter Mayle features two pudgy characters who have sex under a colorful quilt. The man looks like a pink Pillsbury dough boy. I remember thinking that everything about the book was utterly bizarre, but the unsaid rule was that I would read it, and I wouldn\u2019t ask questions. I learned that sex should be kept secret, but the truth is that our very existence depends on people having sex. It\u2019s a natural function of our human bodies, and desire is a very normal emotion, even if we\u2019re told that some forms of desire are unacceptable, even forbidden.<\/p>\n

But isn\u2019t desire the place where so many stories begin? Someone wants something. And then something gets in the way of that wanting, and all of a sudden, we have the conflict and we have a story.<\/p>\n

Tips for Writing Great Sex<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exploit the Messiness
\n<\/em>Having an orgasm is wonderful, but this is rarely the sole reason we want sex, so simplifying it in this way is a sure misfire. Maybe your narrator or character wants to feel loved or make someone fall in love with her. Maybe she wants to manipulate her partner or have an adventure or defy her parents or make sure her spouse finally leaves her for good. The key in any of these cases is to be emotionally honest when presenting the conflicting emotions of desire, whether you\u2019re writing about revenge sex, break-up sex, make-up sex, dutiful sex, make-a-baby sex, forbidden sex, or even a frustrating failed sexual attempt.<\/p>\n

Talk the Right Kind of Dirty
\n<\/em>How would the characters in your piece (including your narrator) have described what was going on as it was happening? If the narrator was saying (or even thinking), \u201cFuck me harder,\u201d and you write it as \u201cMake sweet love to me,\u201d you have totally missed the mark. I\u2019ve heard people say there are no good ways to describe sex and genitalia, but actually, there are lots of ways\u2014everything from edgy, colloquial slang to scientific jargon to poetic image and metaphor, but the language must reflect the tone. And if you\u2019re writing bad sex, then maybe those clinical terms or even the disembodiment of your own body parts is needed by using \u201cthe\u201d instead of \u201cmy,\u201d as in the breasts, the thighs, the cunt. Did that last word make you uncomfortable?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re going to write sex, you\u2019ll have to get over that and allow yourself the full repertoire of sex diction. There are no synonyms; each situation calls for the correct word, and that word could very well be cunt. As writers, we must be able to own every word or at least take them out on loan. Use the words that suit the tone of the piece, and that might mean quieting your inner voice, or the voice of your mother.<\/p>\n

Sometimes \u201cbad\u201d words make good writing. Be brave and unapologetic.<\/p>\n

Break Stereotypes
\n<\/em>One of the reasons stereotypes and clich\u00e9s ruin our writing is because they are mostly untrue. I have never seen it rain cats and dogs, just as I haven\u2019t been in the presence of an actual steaming-hot, throbbing member. (Maybe I\u2019m missing something, but the word member reminds me of a club.) Even if you\u2019re writing about stereotypically bad sex, your language should be fresh and surprising. Oscar Wilde says, \u201cEverything in the world is about sex except for sex. Sex is about power.\u201d While this may be true, don\u2019t just reinforce traditional power dynamics. We see stereotypical representations of sex everywhere in popular culture, including my childhood picture book.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the text that accompanies the picture of the couple beneath the colorful quilt: \u201cThe man wants to get as close to the woman as he can, because he\u2019s feeling very loving to her. And to get really close, the best thing he can do is lie on top of her and put his penis inside her, into her vagina.\u201d The woman is the recipient of male desire: She is the object to his subject, the vessel that he must fill with his own need. How does the woman feel? We cannot know because we only get the man\u2019s perspective. And why does this primer only show sex between a man and a woman? Why not show that men have sex with men and women have sex with women? And that people have sex with themselves. Despite what the book-ban people believe, sex is interesting and varied, and we must write it in all its complexities.<\/p>\n

Our essays, poems, and stories about sex should reflect just how interesting and varied sex can be.<\/p>\n

Sometimes Less Is More
\n<\/em>Write the sex scene in all its fleshy detail, but in revision, ask yourself this: Does it serve the piece? Do the sex scenes move the story forward in some important way? Or maybe, the sex is the story. However, what\u2019s left out can be sexier and more interesting than what remains. Bette Davis said, \u201cI often think that a slightly exposed shoulder emerging from a long satin nightgown packs more sex than two naked bodies in bed.\u201d If your explicit sex scene needs to be trimmed to the exposed shoulder, the ghost of those naked people will remain on the page. A digression can also imply a sex scene\u2014an internal monologue, flashback, flash-forward, or metaphor. Anton Chekhov does this in his famous short story \u201cThe Lady with the Pet Dog.\u201d What happens while we\u2019re following Gurov\u2019s internal monologue becomes obvious a few sentences later through Anna\u2019s action and dialogue. She cries and tells him he won\u2019t respect her. Then Gurov takes that famous bite of watermelon, a metaphor for what has just happened and his nonchalant reaction to it.<\/p>\n

Writing Prompt #21: The Language of Sex<\/strong><\/p>\n

Think of all the words you would normally associate with sex, set your timer for five minutes, and list them\u2014the clinical, the raunchy, the romantic. When your timer goes off, set it for another fifteen minutes and write a sex scene (in poetry, memoir, or fiction\u2014you decide) without using any of the words on your list. This will force you to write about sex in a new way, reaching for fresh words to describe the sexual act. When your time\u2019s up, have a look at what you\u2019ve written. Is it the seed for a poem, story, essay, or chapter? Is it a scene that was needed in something you have already written?<\/p>\n

Bonus Prompt: Unsexy Words for Sex<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do this writing exercise again, but this time, write down words you would never associate with sex, the most unsexy words you can think of, and then use those words in a sex scene. Hopefully, you will come up with a few interesting sentences you otherwise wouldn\u2019t have chosen for this scene or poem, getting you over the hump to writing great sex.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nAdapted from <\/em>52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for the Creative Writer<\/a>\u00a0by Suzanne Roberts\u00a0by\u00a0permission\u00a0of the University of Nebraska Press. \u00a9 2026 Suzanne Roberts Available wherever books are sold or from the Univ. of Nebraska Press\u00a0800.848.6224<\/a>\u00a0and at\u00a0nebraskapress.unl.edu<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This first appeared in Lit Hub\u2019s\u00a0Craft of Writing\u00a0newsletter\u2014sign up here. Only trouble is interesting, and what causes more trouble for us humans than our love lives? With love, we\u2019re leaping into the unknown, and it\u2019s thrilling, surprising, scary, overwhelming (and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31934,"featured_media":276596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,11],"tags":[112140,70841,11340,112141,67126,29215,14293],"class_list":["post-276594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-fullwidth-slider","tag-52-writing-prompts-inspiration-for-the-creative-writer","tag-romance-writing","tag-sex-writing","tag-suzanne-roberts","tag-the-craft-of-writing","tag-university-of-nebraksa-press","tag-writing-prompts"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Xc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/priscilla-du-preez-R2uNyGmeM4-unsplash-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31934"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276521,"date":"2026-09-04T05:09:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276521"},"modified":"2026-09-02T21:32:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T01:32:33","slug":"10-literary-science-fiction-and-fantasy-novels-that-offer-hope-for-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/10-literary-science-fiction-and-fantasy-novels-that-offer-hope-for-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Literary Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels That Offer Hope for the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

During graduate school, I finished the novel that found me an agent\u2014but when my agent submitted it to publishers, all twenty of them turned the manuscript down. Truthfully, it was closer to a collection of loosely-linked short stories, and the feedback from editors was consistent: Pretty sentences. But nothing really happens.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

This is not to impugn books in which little happens! I love those books, which is why I tried to write one. As a teenager, I revered realist literary fiction, stories whose epiphanies emerged from quiet, interpersonal moments\u2014stories that needed no pyrotechnics to move me as a reader. I wanted to write like that, and to be taken seriously in the way of those writers. I feared allegations of sentimentality, avoided melodrama, and wrote characters so faint that even my agent once delicately suggested that a protagonist \u201cget a hobby.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, I was devastated when my novel-in-stories died on submission. After I recovered, though, I saw the truth of the feedback. Many writers do a beautiful job with subtle fiction. I just wasn\u2019t one of them. I thought, too, of the books that shaped my brain as a young reader, like A Wrinkle of Time<\/i> and His Dark Materials<\/i>: epic science fiction and fantasy that introduced me to other worlds while also paying close attention to prose and character. What if I tried to write a book like that<\/i>?<\/p>\n

My first two novels are ultimately realist, though each has a speculative element. The Anatomy of Dreams<\/i> follows two dream researchers working beneath a charismatic but ethically-questionable professor. In The Immortalists<\/i>, four siblings visit a fortuneteller who claims to be able to tell anyone their date of death. But Under Story<\/i>, in which a divorced couple discover a time-bending parallel universe, is the first time I committed fully to genre fiction.<\/p>\n

I felt intimidated. To write about our world well is challenging enough; to write well about an imaginary world is a different, riddle-strewn gauntlet. There were so many issues to brainstorm, so many problems to solve and reversals to think through. By the end of the day, I was often so mentally exhausted that I struggled to think of words. But the process was thrilling, too. I wrote the first draft over five years, immersing myself in its worldbuilding, crosshatching real science with invented elements. I wanted to be meticulous enough that readers could give themselves permission to believe\u2014to do a magic trick so airtight that it would feel real even to me.<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t want the worldbuilding to overshadow the heart of the novel: the story of a single couple\u2019s grief and healing, their under story. In many ways, it\u2019s the story of my healing from years of chronic pain, though there isn\u2019t a migraine in the book. Still, Under Story<\/i> is about the devastation of a life that breaks down and the miracle of the life that blooms from those ashes. It is a tribute to the fact that existence is always both\/and, not either\/or: pain and pleasure, loss and love.<\/p>\n

In early interviews, I\u2019ve been asked whether I received any pushback from my publisher about the cross-genre nature of the novel. I\u2019m glad to be able to say that I haven\u2019t. In the past, genre titles and authors were often shunted into discrete lanes\u2014but I have the sense that this changing. Perhaps it has to do with the success of films like Christopher Nolan\u2019s Inception <\/i>or TV like Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling\u2019s The OA<\/i>, both of which are high-concept and beautifully-executed. Or maybe it relates to the fact that the real world feels increasingly surreal, even genre-bending itself. Our political system vacillates between absurdism and horror. Developments in AI drag us, willingly or unwillingly, into a technological landscape that often feels like science fiction. (I am among the unwilling; I refuse to believe that my life would be better if I\u2019d just outsource my mind.) In this context, science fiction and fantasy offer a mirror as well as a line of hope. Perhaps it isn\u2019t too late to change our trajectory\u2014and perhaps alternate visions of the world, and of the future, can give us ideas.<\/p>\n

Below are some of the literary-leaning science fiction and fantasy titles that inspired me along the way.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

These fantastical stories have elements of many different genres, from the magical realism with which Borges is often associated to detective narratives. Borges is rigorously imaginative: I love the almost lawyerly intensity with which he argues his inventions, as though daring us not to believe him. In \u201cTl\u00f6n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,\u201d he lays out an \u201cundocumented country\u201d with a blend of intellectual intensity and sheer playfulness, from that country\u2019s language (\u201cThere is no word corresponding to the noun moon<\/i>, but there is a verb to moon<\/i> or to moondle<\/i>\u201d) and views on literature (\u201cThe concept of plagiarism does not exist; it has been established that all books are the work of one single writer, who is timeless and anonymous\u201d) to its phenomenon of hr\u00f6nir<\/i> (\u201csecondary\u201d versions of lost objects that spring into being \u201ca little larger than the originals\u201d) and theories about time: one school of thought \u201cdeclares that the whole of time <\/i>has already happened and that our life is a vague memory of dim reflection, doubtless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process. Another school has it that the history of the universe, which contains the history of our lives and the most tenuous details of them, is the handwriting produced buy a minor god in order to communicate with a demon.\u201d How can you not be alternately enlightened and delighted?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Ursula K. LeGuin, \u201cThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know that a perfect novel exists (they are simply too big, too inherently textured), but I do believe that a perfect short story is possible, because \u201cThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas\u201d is one of them. At five pages, it is astoundingly economical and metaphorically genius: a fable about capitalism, to my mind, though you can read it in so many ways.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ted Chiang\u2019s short stories feel like thought experiments, each considered with exceptional meticulousness and integrity. They are scientifically engaged but not dry, morally curious but not pedantic. The titular novella at the heart of this collection (\u201cStory of Your Life\u201d) is one of my favorite pieces of writing\u2026 ever. As someone who is fascinated by aliens but continually frustrated by how often alien narratives end in war or violence, I was captivated by the way that Chiang braids time and language while imagining a new species. I still think of this piece as the gold standard when it comes to soulful science fiction.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi <\/i><\/a>and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

There is something I need to confess. The first time I started Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell<\/i>, I stopped after seventy-five pages. Despite the fact that it had been emphatically recommend by friends who know my taste\u2014and despite the fact that I loved the writing\u2014I lost speed during a section on naval magic and feared that the rest of the book would have more military content than tends to hold my interest. Years later, though\u2014after I fell in love with Piranesi<\/i>, Clarke\u2019s second novel\u2014I knew that I had to give Strange & Norrell<\/i> another chance. I can hardly stomach the thought of what I would have missed otherwise. This is a top-five-favorite novel for me; it is almost nine hundred pages, and I would have gladly read twice as many. Strange and Norrell is part political and academic satire, part sincere expression of belief in magic and mystery and art. It\u2019s also technically dazzling, even risky (Jonathan Strange, not only a major but a titular <\/i>character, is introduced after 200 pages\u2014in a footnote<\/i>), full of heart, and very funny.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jeff VanderMeer, The Southern Reach<\/a> <\/i>Series<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vandermeer\u2019s eerie series has been described as \u201ceco-horror\u201d and \u201ccli-fi,\u201d relatively new terms that reflect how current these books feel, despite their fantastical elements. They document investigations into the fictional Area X, a portion of American coastline where nature is behaving strangely. To say anything else would be to spoil the wild ride of this series, which is outrageously inventive, often trippy, and genuinely fresh. I\u2019ve never read anything like it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West<\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exit West <\/i>imagines the refugee crisis with a powerful magical realist twist. Saeed and Nadia live in an unnamed country tormented by civil war\u2014and meanwhile, there are rumors of mysterious doors, portals that lead to other places. The fusing of realist horror with a fantastical device allows for a kind of prismatic re-seeing in the way of a parable. At the same time, Hamid employs a lightness of touch, and moments of humor, even when his characters are enduring the unendurable. Grief is always with these characters, but they have not allowed it to rob them of the capacity for other emotional experiences. When I finished Exit West<\/i>, I thought of a famous line by Samuel Beckett\u2014\u201cI can\u2019t go on, I\u2019ll go on\u201d\u2014and how true it feels to human being.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey, Vita Nostra<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

My friend Brittany Cavallaro gives me some of the best book recommendations, because she knows that what I crave most is immersion. Reading Vita Nostra<\/i>\u2014written by a Ukrainian couple and set in Russia\u2014means being immersed in a metaphysical magic school: rain and streetlights and clanking radiators, enigmatic professors and strange gold coins, overnight trains, the smell of damp leaves, mortal danger, and the kind of mind-bending that reminds you how little we know of reality after all. The novel follows\u00a0teenager Sasha Samokhina’s matriculation at the Institute of Special Technologies. The Institute’s professors teach something utterly mystifying: for years, neither Sasha nor her classmates can figure out exactly what it is. While reading Vita Nostra<\/i>, I felt like a fellow student at the Institute, studying their materials, experiencing my own metamorphosis. The full reveal is as satisfying as any fantasy concept I’ve encountered.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

My first novel, The Anatomy of Dreams<\/i>, was inspired by this one. I was so arrested by Kathy\u2019s voice\u2014that sense of trouble under calm water, nostalgia pressured by melancholy\u2014that some light turned on in my brain. I\u2019ll be the first to say that Ishiguro did it better: Never Let Me Go<\/i> explores issues of science, ethics, and creativity to heartbreaking effect. Ishiguro often blends literary and genre elements, from the off-kilter fantasy of THE BURIED GIANT to the noirish WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS. Indeed, the way he plays with memory makes it seem like a not-quite-realist genre of its own, wavy at the edges and unnervingly malleable.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Singh, also a physicist (!), was born in New Delhi, and in many of her stories, Indian myths and landscapes fuse with otherworldly ones. There is also a distinctly environmental lens that reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer: in one story, a newly-invented energy grid is based on fungal networks. Another story imagines a planet whose beings relate through the concept of kinship.\u00a0Each story contains a novel’s worth of plot and character, and the prose is gorgeous\u2014lush but precise, musical and surprising. For some reason, despite how deeply reading makes me feel, I rarely cry while doing it; but one of these short stories made me weep on the beach at a family vacation. Yet I find hope in them, too. \u201cRequiem,\u201d the final story in\u00a0Ambiguity\u00a0Machines<\/i>, follows an anti-corporate uprising in which animals partner with humans. Singh’s collection reminds me that there is hope to be found in collectivity, and that imagination is as powerful a tool as any.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Under Story<\/a>\u00a0by Chloe Benjamin is available from Putnam.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During graduate school, I finished the novel that found me an agent\u2014but when my agent submitted it to publishers, all twenty of them turned the manuscript down. Truthfully, it was closer to a collection of loosely-linked short stories, and the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31923,"featured_media":276536,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135,43445],"tags":[112122,112128,28564,24743,37215,2890,112124,2889,1567,112127,8553,29018,49687,112123,8688,16230,112125,111905,35949,46237,112126],"class_list":["post-276521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","category-technology","tag-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas","tag-ambiguity-machines-and-other-stories","tag-chloe-benjamin","tag-exit-west","tag-ficciones","tag-jeff-vandermeer","tag-jonathan-strange-and-dr-norrell","tag-jorge-luis-borges","tag-kazuo-ishiguro","tag-marina-and-sergey-dyachenko","tag-mohsin-hamid","tag-never-let-me-go","tag-piranesi","tag-stories-of-your-life-and-others","tag-susanna-clarke","tag-ted-chiang","tag-the-southern-reach-series","tag-under-story","tag-ursula-k-leguin","tag-vandana-singh","tag-vita-nostra"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19W1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sci-fi-reading-list.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31923"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276611,"date":"2026-09-04T05:08:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276611"},"modified":"2026-09-03T21:45:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T01:45:05","slug":"what-should-you-read-next-here-are-the-best-reviewed-books-of-the-week-9-4-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/what-should-you-read-next-here-are-the-best-reviewed-books-of-the-week-9-4-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marlon James\u2019\u00a0The Disappearers<\/em>, Jon Ronson\u2019s\u00a0The Castle<\/em>, Chloe Benjamin\u2019s\u00a0Under Story<\/em>, and Emily Wilson\u2019s\u00a0Crossing the Wine Dark Sea<\/em>\u00a0all feature among the best reviewed books of the month.<\/p>\n

Brought to you by\u00a0Book Marks<\/a>, Lit Hub\u2019s home for book reviews.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Fiction<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

1.\u00a0The Disappearers<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Marlon James
\n(Riverhead)<\/strong><\/p>\n

13 Rave \u2022 2 Positive \u2022 2 Mixed
\nRead a profile of Marlon James\u00a0here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA harrowing, hilarious, magnificent novel that will stand the test of time \u2026 He invents his own literary language, horny yet tender, punctuated by puns and music and elegant flourishes. He jolts the narrative sideways and backwards, thumping his suspense line like an expert bassist \u2026 His defiant queer epic belongs to us all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Hamilton Cain (The Boston Globe<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Under<\/a><\/p>\n

2.\u00a0Under Story<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Chloe Benjamin
\n(G.P. Putnam\u2019s Sons)<\/strong><\/p>\n

6 Rave \u2022 2 Positive \u2022 1 Pan<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe novel\u2019s success hinges on your ability to suspend your disbelief as profoundly as you draw upon your capacity to love. With the portals and time travel, the story requires an open mind. Even with such a fantastical plot, Benjamin draws complex, deeply human characters \u2026 Benjamin could have written a far shorter novel. Some may say that less is more. But\u00a0Under Story<\/em>\u00a0isn\u2019t meant to be a minimalist work \u2026 Expands our expectations of living.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Lauren LeBlanc (The New York Times Book Review<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Agrippa:<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0Agrippa<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Robert Harris
\n(Doubleday)<\/strong><\/p>\n

5 Rave \u2022 3 Positive \u2022 2 Mixed \u2022 1 Pan<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cImaginative \u2026 Thrilling \u2026 A swift-paced romp through a few crucial decades of Roman history, breathing life into a figure who played a central role in the story of the late republic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Michael F. Bishop (The Wall Street Journal<\/em>)<\/p>\n

\"Asmodeus\"<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0Asmodeus<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Rita Indiana
\n(Graywolf)<\/strong><\/p>\n

2 Rave \u2022 2 Positive \u2022 1 Mixed<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c[A] dark fantasy \u2026 The poetry and musical lyrics are all masterfully translated by Obejas, a respected novelist in her own right. Indiana presents music (and story) as a venue for addressing the problems that plague this viscerally squalid, gritty, and painful world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Sara Mart\u00ednez (Booklist<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"I<\/a><\/p>\n

5.\u00a0I Liked Rex<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Diane Williams
\n(NYRB Classics)<\/strong><\/p>\n

1 Rave \u2022 1 Positive \u2022 1 Mixed<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cDelightful characters, curious images, and love affairs gone awry animate this minimalist metafictional collection \u2026 These deceptively simple stories eschew linear plots to home in on arresting images and phrases that reveal their characters\u2019 complex and resonant inner lives: \u2018The loss of paradise keeps happening,\u2019 reflects a recent divorc\u00e9. This is one to savor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Publishers Weekly<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

**<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nonfiction<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

1.\u00a0The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Jon Ronson
\n(Riverhead)<\/strong><\/p>\n

7 Rave \u2022 3 Positive \u2022 1 Mixed<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is his first book in 11 years and it\u2019s as good a read as any of his previous big hits. A Jon Ronson book is never clear-cut, there are no neat finishes or satisfying conclusions.\u00a0The Castle<\/em>\u00a0is no different. But like all of his writing, this book will open new insights for you, and it will linger long after you\u2019ve closed the final chapter \u2026 A great attempt to unpick modern masculinity and to see what is prompting a real mental health crisis in men. Only when we understand it will we be able to address it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Sinead Gibney (The Irish Times<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"American<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn\u2019s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Kai Bird
\n(Scribner)<\/strong><\/p>\n

7 Rave \u2022 2 Positive<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI gobbled up every page \u2026 A bounteous cornucopia of midcentury sleaze and uneasily addictive for just that reason \u2026 As ugly and lurid as this saga is,\u00a0American Scoundrel<\/em>\u00a0is consistently riveting, full of astonishing twists, ballsy plots, and eleventh-hour escapes from justice, like the legal version of the exploits of some Old West outlaw who is forever eluding the sheriffs by the skin of his teeth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Laura Miller (Slate<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Crossing<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Emily Wilson<\/strong>
\n(Liveright)<\/strong><\/p>\n

6 Rave<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWonderfully spirited \u2026 An expert in the ancient world, she nevertheless draws constantly (and productively) from contemporary culture \u2026 Wilson elegantly braids together close, line-by-line readings with larger arguments about how much is often at stake \u2026 You don\u2019t even have to be particularly interested in ancient literature to enjoy this book, though by the time you finish it you probably will be. Wilson\u2019s excitement for her subject is irrepressibly moving.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

4.\u00a0The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Izabella Scott<\/strong>
\n(FSG Originals)<\/strong><\/p>\n

2 Rave \u2022 2 Positive \u2022 1 Mixed<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cScott is less interested in whether this was the correct verdict than she is in investigating the larger meanings of this strange, sad trial, which exposed the private lives of both participants to ridicule \u2026 Scott is a supremely good guide to this complex terrain, thoughtful, nuanced and agile.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Olivia Laing (The Guardian<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"53<\/a><\/p>\n

5.\u00a053 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Timothy W. Ryback<\/strong>
\n(Atlantic Monthly Press)<\/strong><\/p>\n

2 Rave \u2022 1 Positive \u2022 1 Mixed<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cStep by step, the book recounts the process by which Hitler exploited his position in order to install autocracy. Ryback deftly manages what could have been an unwieldy narrative, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about the book\u2019s relevance to current events.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Kirk Johnson (Booklist<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marlon James\u2019\u00a0The Disappearers, Jon Ronson\u2019s\u00a0The Castle, Chloe Benjamin\u2019s\u00a0Under Story, and Emily Wilson\u2019s\u00a0Crossing the Wine Dark Sea\u00a0all feature among the best reviewed books of the month. Brought to you by\u00a0Book Marks, Lit Hub\u2019s home for book reviews. * Fiction 1.\u00a0The Disappearers\u00a0by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":276622,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[15654,13821,33508],"class_list":["post-276611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-book-marks","tag-book-reviews","tag-the-best-reviewed-books-of-the-week"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Xt","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/crossingthewinedarksea.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/873"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276278,"date":"2026-09-04T05:08:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276278"},"modified":"2026-08-31T13:07:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T17:07:35","slug":"how-fordism-and-fascism-gave-birth-to-modern-car-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-fordism-and-fascism-gave-birth-to-modern-car-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"How Fordism and Fascism Gave Birth to Modern Car Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1934, writing from his prison cell, Antonio Gramsci reflected on the sweeping transformations reshaping industrial production in the United States. The rise of the automobile and the wider Fordist factory, he argued, signaled a new economic and moral order, one that imposed discipline upon the worker, imbued the wage with ethical significance and blurred the line between production and private life. Of the industrial innovations underpinning this order, the assembly line and vertical integration were most significant.<\/p>\n

Ford had introduced the moving assembly line in 1913, subjecting workers to repeating the same easily learned task again and again\u2014boosting productivity and disciplining laborers. Simultaneously, the direct management of inputs and distribution\u2014from rubber plantations to railway tracks\u2014permitted lower production costs, translating not only to lower prices but also to higher-than-average wages. After the invention of the internal combustion engine in 1885, the auto industry had comprised skilled laborers producing a few bespoke vehicles\u2014affordable only to an upper stratum of society. Fordist industrial methods, however, made cars increasingly available and began to organize the “whole life of the nation” around production.<\/p>\n

If “the history of industrialism has always been a continuing struggle against the element of ‘animality’ in man,” as Gramsci posed, it is telling that Ford found his inspiration for worker discipline in industrial abattoirs. Visiting slaughterhouses in Chicago and Cincinnati, he saw animal carcasses moving between butchers on overhead conveyor belts. Translating this logic to cars, Ford devised an assembly line where parts moved between stationary laborers, “taking the work to the men rather than the men to the work.” This echoed Frederick Winslow Taylor\u2019s idea of scientific management, which sought efficiency through control and standardization of the labor process. Also intent on taming animal spirits, Taylor aimed to eliminate the “human content” from work, leaving in its place what he infamously described as a “trained gorilla.” With labor rendered interchangeable, it was not uncommon for fifty different languages to be spoken on Detroit\u2019s shop floors. Migrants to the auto plants came mostly from the American south and European countries, with many also coming from the Middle East to Ford\u2019s Dearborn factories.<\/p>\n

The formulation “industry of industries” thus draws attention to the raw materials the car is made from and the myriad economic practices it enables.<\/p>\n

Fordism was never confined to the factory. The vertically integrated, rationalized production process was complemented by, in Gramsci\u2019s words, “extremely subtle ideological and political propaganda” in which workers were not only compensated for their labor, but also their conduct: their temperance, thrift and domesticity. Ford and his inspectors in the company\u2019s Sociological Department monitored his employees\u2019 private lives\u2014what they ate and drank and how they lived. Though eventually abandoned due to cost, this system of surveillance endeavored to equate producers with virtue. More than a disciplined laborer, Ford desired a moral industrial citizen\u2014a “master in industrial method” who would volunteer “for the mines and the railroads” should “the fires of a hundred industries threaten to go out for lack of coal.” His ambition, then, was to “mould the political, social, industrial and moral mass into a sound and shapely whole.”<\/p>\n

Such expectations were sustained by relatively high wages. Before the five-dollar day in 1914, the annual turnover of workers at Ford was so high the company had to recruit nearly a thousand employees to retain just a hundred. This new pay packet, judged a “family wage,” was the basis for the male-breadwinner model, or the “Fordist family,” accentuating the wage\u2019s “moral dimension” while granting legitimacy and a certain degree of bourgeois respectability to sections of the working class. It also supported emergent norms of working-class consumption. “I\u2019m not saying our workers will sing Caruso or govern the state. No, we can leave such ravings to the European socialists. But the workers will <\/i>buy automobiles,” Ford announced. Separation from the means of production was redeemed through consumption; investing the working class more deeply in the relations of production.<\/p>\n

While ensuring control of inputs and distribution served to lower production costs, there was also an ideological motive behind Ford\u2019s pursuit of vertical integration: to limit his dependence on others. Ford owned and financed his projects internally, as he “loathed banks and outside investors and was determined to maintain total control of his company.” His disdain for finance capital was inseparable from his full-throated anti-Semitism. Openly espousing Jewish hatred, Ford was “a major organ of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” distributing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion <\/i>and The International Jew<\/i>, a serialized diatribe of conspiracies, through his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent<\/i>. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the paper was circulated across the company\u2019s dealership network, with many dealers putting a copy of the Independent <\/i>in the glove box of every new car.<\/p>\n

Ideologically, these practices and beliefs coalesced into what Stefan Link has called an “industrial moral economy,” wherein a community of producers struggled against financiers and idle profiteers. Ford praised the man who “earned his bread” and rebuked those “who gamble with the fruits of other men\u2019s labors.” His rhetoric echoed late nineteenth-century Midwestern populism, wherein the producer contributes to the nation\u2019s wealth while the rentier and financier siphon from it. “The negation of the industrial idea,” wrote Ford, “is the effort to make a profit out of speculation instead of out of work.” The logic underpinning this moral economy, then, aligns with the core tenets of “producerism”: an ideology distinguishing those who contribute to the prosperity of their community and those who live off the resources that they did not produce\u2014the virtuous maker versus the parasitic taker.<\/p>\n

The industrial moral economy of Fordism became especially attractive in Italy, Germany, Russia and Japan\u2014all countries wishing to escape the grip of British and American financiers. Throughout the 1930s, specialists from this “transnational illiberal modernist network” visited Detroit, spending “weeks, months, even years at River Rouge to learn the American secret of mass production.” “Only a single great man,” to the chagrin of the Jews, “still maintains full independence,” Adolf Hitler wrote admiringly of Ford in Mein Kampf<\/i>. He hung Ford\u2019s portrait in his office, and in 1938 the Nazi regime awarded him an official honorific: the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. Another senior Nazi on trial in Nuremberg\u2014Baldur von Schirach\u2014credited a collected volume, The International Jew<\/i>, as the source of his bigotry. The flowering of nationalist imaginations, it seems, often has cosmopolitan roots.<\/p>\n

Both Hitler and Mussolini conceived grand projects for mass auto production with VW at Wolfsburg and Fiat at Mirafiori. For Hitler, cars were “mankind\u2019s most marvelous means of transport”; his ambition was to build “a people\u2019s car” that sold for under a thousand reichsmarks. Originally it was called the “Kraft durch Freude Wagen” (“strength-through-joy car”), later changed simply to “Volkswagen.” For Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Germans would be “a happy people in a country full of blossoming beauty, traversed by the silver ribbons of wide roads, which are open to the modest car for the small man.” This vision of modernity, oriented towards the future, never materialized in the way its architects foresaw.<\/p>\n

Limited by fuel and rubber shortages, and reliant on forced labor, not a single finished car reached a civilian as war consumed Europe and millions lost their savings in deposit schemes: the people \u2019s car was a “disastrous flop.” Yet some of the silver ribbons were built. Germany and Italy expanded motorway networks\u2014the Autobahn <\/i>and the autostrada<\/i>\u2014laying the foundations for the automobile\u2019s privileged position in this modernity. When a delegation of British MPs inspected the newly minted Autobahnen <\/i>before the war, the team were dazzled by the “sheer clean beauty” and “vigorous sweeping curves” of the road, which seemed to conform to the natural landscapes: a blueprint to follow.<\/p>\n

On the eve of the Second World War, a transnational template for modernity had been set. According to Link, exchanges throughout the 1930s “laid the groundwork for the infrastructure of global Fordism.” Yet it was the shift to a war footing that accelerated its spread: the principles of mass production were embraced in the armaments factories of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union alike, even though the latter never developed a substantial automobile industry. Volkswagen\u2019s factory in Wolfsburg, built partially with confiscated trade union funds, shifted to military production, and was preserved by the Allies seeking to rebuild West Germany in the war\u2019s aftermath. Meanwhile, in the United States, the coming of war and the promise of lucrative federal contracts dramatically reoriented the relationship between industrial capital and the New Deal state. Detroit, temporarily suspending its identity as Motor City, was rechristened the “Arsenal of Democracy” by Roosevelt. The carmakers now “built tanks, airplanes, radar units, field kitchens, amphibious vehicles, jeeps, bombsights, and bullets\u2014billions and billions of bullets.”<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In 1946, business analyst Peter Drucker identified auto manufacturing as the pinnacle of “modern industry.” It is “to the twentieth century what the Lancashire cotton mills were to the early nineteenth century: the industry of industries.” We can take from this a double meaning: the car industry was not only a prototype for the wider industrial economy, given that the production of this one commodity was emblematic of wider shifts in economic organisation. It was also its pacesetter, with the car dictating the tempo for associated industries. The formulation “industry of industries” thus draws attention to the raw materials the car is made from and the myriad economic practices it enables, situating the car as the coordinating node for expanding quantities of matter and energy, a lynchpin in wider productive interrelations.<\/p>\n

This union of fossil energy and physical resources is consummated in those regions building infrastructure for private mobility, which rapidly escalated after the Second World War.<\/p>\n

From this perspective, automobility can be seen as a central driver widening the “metabolic rift” a term used describe the rupture between humanity and its natural conditions. With humanity\u2019s ecological interchange with nature subsumed and directed by capital\u2019s endless circuits of accumulation, the exploitation of natural resources and the aggregation of waste ensues. Upstream, the automotive industry exists in productive symbiosis with steel, oil, glass, rubber, aggregates, concrete, electronics, engineering and construction, each transforming flows of matter first to value and then to waste.<\/p>\n

Downstream, a radiating network of operations is set in motion after the car rolls off the assembly line\u2014credit and insurance providers, marketing and sales showrooms, maintenance and repair workshops, petrol stations and car washes, distribution and logistics systems, the arterial networks of highways and roads, car-dependent retail parks and roadside restaurants\u2014each with a distinct social and ecological metabolism. Capital accumulates through a spiraling network orbiting the car: activating numerous circuits, the system of automobility is an expression of self-expanding value in motion. Guided by the imperatives of capital accumulation, automobility deepens the metabolic rift on multiple fronts and prepares the ground for the “Great Acceleration” of ecological destruction. The car might well deserve the epithet of “the Anthropocene \u2019s battering ram.” No industry\u2019s fortunes were more intimately tied to the car than oil.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the twentieth century, oil markets were threatened by the transition away from kerosene and gas lighting towards electric light. But primitive fossil capital was rescued by the automobile. Since their initial coming together, the oil and automotive industries have remained interlocked, the availability of oil influencing the character and direction of the car industry. When the east Texas oilfield was discovered in the interwar years, gasoline prices fell sharply, incentivizing bigger engines and vehicles, while encouraging longer journeys. With fewer domestic discoveries, high import tariffs and fragmented markets that curtailed economies of scale in production, such extravagances were unavailable to Europeans, who became accustomed to smaller, more efficient cars. Indeed, the “automobile revolution” was most advanced in the United States, which not only consumed more oil per vehicle, but also was home to the most vehicles in absolute terms, boasting four-fifths of the world\u2019s car fleet on the brink of the Second World War.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the booming car industry shaped the oil industry. Seemingly, the only thing that could slow down the automobile takeover was diminishing fuel supplies, fear of which had become a fixation of American oil companies and government officials after the Armistice. The First World War had been decisive: oil and autos became central commodities tied to national security and imperial ambitions. Inaugurating a new era of industrialized warfare, navies replaced coal with oil, cavalry was supplemented with tanks, and horse-drawn transport gave way to motorized vehicles. Not wishing to return to the wartime “gasolineless Sundays,” and with the US Geological Survey warning of an impending “gasoline famine” stemming from the automobile\u2019s voracious demand, the head of that body, George Otis Smith, urged the US government to support domestic oil companies seeking overseas exploration. This was the dynamic that produced American oil\u2019s pivot to the Middle East. Fittingly, a local agent of the Ford Motor Company intermediated the first negotiations in the early 1930s for Standard Oil of California\u2019s rights to Saudi oil.<\/p>\n

The forces of destruction accumulated through the Second World War. Soldiers were increasingly displaced by “extraordinarily powerful machines” requiring “growing quantities of raw materials and energy.” The United States, Drucker wrote, indulged in a “veritable orgy of natural-capital consumption,” leading to soil depletion and overconsumption of “irreplaceable fuels and ores.” As wars became more deeply integrated into the industrial system, the relationship between society and nature was further brutalised. Tanks, manufactured in Allied and non-Allied auto factories alike, were a “developmental model” for clear-cutters, harvesters, bulldozers and other “brute force technologies” later used to level forests, buildings and land. The demands of war vastly expanded productive infrastructure. The network of pipelines and refineries necessary for military airfields, for example, was foundational for the petrolization of societies. In short, military mobilization was industrial mobilization.<\/p>\n

As automobility spread across society, writes Adam Hanieh, “it was no longer just industry and the military that demanded ever-increasing quantities of petroleum: oil consumption was now propelled forward by the daily needs of the individual and the house-hold.” Beyond powering vehicles, the wider machinic complex also depended on fossil fuels. The infrastructure required to get oil from basin to fuel tank involves refineries, pipelines, tankers, storage facilities and service stations\u2014demanding tonnes of coke-produced steel. If coal and oil infuse the finished product, they also bind together the hardware they run on: asphalt and cement, the core components of roads, are generally both dependent on coal. This union of fossil energy and physical resources is consummated in those regions building infrastructure for private mobility, which rapidly escalated after the Second World War.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From<\/em> The Great Driving Right Show: Cars, Crisis, and the Rise of Fossil Fascism<\/a> by The Zetkin Collective. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from Verso Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1934, writing from his prison cell, Antonio Gramsci reflected on the sweeping transformations reshaping industrial production in the United States. The rise of the automobile and the wider Fordist factory, he argued, signaled a new economic and moral order,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31837,"featured_media":276320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101,43092,43095],"tags":[45934,8351,9024,68222,15268,8121,112046,112047,3147,5132],"class_list":["post-276278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-cars","tag-fascism","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-henry-ford","tag-industry","tag-labor","tag-the-great-driving-right-show-cars-crisis-and-the-rise-of-fossil-fascism","tag-the-zetkin-collective","tag-verso-books","tag-world-war-ii"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19S6","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Dagenham-photo-cars-one-assembly-line-pictures-1931-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31837"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275669,"date":"2026-09-04T05:08:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275669"},"modified":"2026-08-31T13:08:42","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T17:08:42","slug":"the-barman-of-the-ritz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-barman-of-the-ritz\/","title":{"rendered":"The Barman of the Ritz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paris was occupied by German troops from June 14, 1940, to August 25, 1944: 1,533 nights. One thousand five hundred and thirty-three nights during which the Ritz was transformed from a luxury hotel into a stomping ground for the Nazi elite. There are a thousand and one ways to recount this story; <\/em>The Barman of the Ritz is a novel based on actual facts and actual people. It is an account of those dark years in France. But there are grey areas in the life of Frank Meier that\u2014as Ren\u00e9 Girard puts it\u2014intersect fictional \u201ctruth\u201d and romantic \u201clies.\u201d The Frank Meier in this novel is both real and fictitious. The character of Luciano is fictitious, just as that of Fersen is inspired by various people in Meier\u2019s entourage during those years. The excerpts from Meier\u2019s diary are my own invention, conceived as a way to shed light on this extraordinary life.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this attempt to recreate life in Paris under the Occupation, the aim is less to be \u201ctrue\u201d at all times than it is to capture the conflicting emotions that may have preoccupied Frank Meier.<\/em><\/p>\n

In his position, what would you have done?<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

June 13, 1940<\/em><\/p>\n

Tomorrow, German troops will march into Paris. France has dissolved like a lump of sugar in a glass of absinthe.<\/p>\n

Barely a month has passed since the Battle of France began. By now, the tanks and armored vehicles of Generaloberst Guderian\u2019s panzer divisions are rolling through the forests of the Ardennes. There is fighting in Rouen. There are battles in Senlis. The Nazis have crossed the River Marne. Since yesterday, the skies over the city have been thick with ominous black smoke; the capital has already surrendered. It has been declared an \u201copen city.\u201d As for the people of Paris, many of them have fled. By train, by car, in horse-drawn carts, or on foot, families take only as much as they can carry, leaving most of their possessions behind. The mass exodus has gutted the city, with millions of its inhabitants scattered to the winds. Those remaining have locked themselves away in their apartments. The only thing circulating in the city now is rumor.<\/p>\n

The government of the French Republic fled the city two days ago and is now based in Tours. No more government, taxis, police, mail\u2014no more public services. Panic is spreading like wildfire. Archives have been burned in ministerial courtyards, while gangs of looters plunder abandoned shops and apartments. Otherwise, the streets are empty; shops have rolled down their shutters. Paris is mired in silence, solitude, and death.<\/p>\n

But in the Place Vend\u00f4me, the grand H\u00f4tel Ritz is still open for business.<\/p>\n

It is difficult to believe that, only a fortnight ago, Winston Churchill was staying in this very hotel. Now, the regulars have vanished. Coco Chanel has taken refuge in Biarritz. The Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis have flown to Spain. Barbara Hutton, n\u00e9e Woolworth and heiress to the Woolworth fortune, is still ensconced in her first-floor suite, packing and unpacking, unsure whether to stay or to go.<\/p>\n

In the passageway that connects the two wings of the hotel, the Galerie des Merveilles, the boutique stores of famous brands that line its corridor have already taken on the patina of a bygone era. Two days ago, the Bar Cambon closed its doors.<\/p>\n

Only the Petit Bar remains open. As usual, service begins at 6 p.m. The decor has not changed since the day it first opened: polished bar, mahogany paneling, leather lampshades, Louis XV armchairs upholstered in eau-de-nil velvet. The bottles are impeccably arranged behind the bar like books in a library. This is the domain of Frank Meier, the barman of the Ritz. Austrian by birth, celebrated for his artistry with cocktails and worshipped by the most refined drinkers in Europe and America, the man is a legend in the world of luxury. His pencil mustache, his fastidious gestures, and his twinkling eyes are at least as famous as his drinks. On the eve of the German invasion, he is behind his bar\u2014his white jacket crisp and black tie neat\u2014as he has been for the past twenty years.<\/p>\n

It was Frank himself who opened this bar in 1921, and he is determined to stay no matter the cost, despite the Germans, despite the fall of France. He tries to appear aloof, but tonight the barman of the Ritz is at a loss. Troubled. Beneath his affable demeanor, the signs of worry and fear are beginning to show. Frank Meir has spent a lifetime running from his past, carefully concealing his heritage, though people did not seem to care.<\/p>\n

People just see me as a barman, someone who\u2019s good with his hands, a god of bottles. It\u2019s as if I\u2019ve always been here, as if I was born behind the bar.<\/em><\/p>\n

But Frank Meier was not born behind the bar. And though he now feels far removed from his roots, he has a secret: he is a Jew.<\/p>\n

Tonight, his only customer, Otto von Habsburg, the deposed heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is drowning his sorrows in gin. The Nazis have put a price on his head and he has no choice but to flee. Tonight. So, Otto sits at the end of the counter, ruminating on the past weeks, then downs his glass of Gordon\u2019s. Slowly, the Royal Prince of Hungary, Bohemia, and Croatia gets to his feet and places his spindly arms around the barman, who is old enough to be his father. Frank stiffens. The embrace feels like an ending. Otto von Habsburg bids farewell to Europe; in a few days\u2019 time, he will be in Washington. The barman of the Ritz watches as his last customer of the old world disappears.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Barman of the Ritz<\/a> by Philippe Collin. Used with permission of the publisher, Scribner. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Philippe Collin.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paris was occupied by German troops from June 14, 1940, to August 25, 1944: 1,533 nights. One thousand five hundred and thirty-three nights during which the Ritz was transformed from a luxury hotel into a stomping ground for the Nazi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":275678,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,43076,26764],"tags":[111737,454,111736],"class_list":["post-275669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-from-the-novel","category-novels","tag-philippe-collin","tag-scribner","tag-the-barman-of-the-ritz","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ih","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-barman-of-the-ritz-9781668097199_lg.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276364,"date":"2026-09-04T05:07:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276364"},"modified":"2026-08-31T13:00:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T17:00:37","slug":"latin-americas-agrarian-novels-chronicled-the-birth-of-a-new-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/latin-americas-agrarian-novels-chronicled-the-birth-of-a-new-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Latin America\u2019s Agrarian Novels Chronicled the Birth of a New World"},"content":{"rendered":"

We begin in medias res, along a path traveled by a landowner. In the opening pages of R\u00f3mulo Gallegos\u2019s landmark 1929 novel Do\u00f1a B\u00e1rbara<\/i>, the novel\u2019s protagonist, Santos Luzardo, travels toward his ancestral estate deep in the plains region of Venezuela. Two \u201cbronzed\u201d oarsmen alternately plunge poles into the muddy water to propel a canoe forward under a blazing midday sun. Santos, meanwhile, a white man dressed in the manner of \u201cthe city dweller who is careful of his appearance,\u201d contemplates the wilderness.<\/p>\n

His objective, we soon learn, is to sell the family estate, Altamira, and, in keeping with the predilections of the region\u2019s landed elite, move to Europe. But upon arriving in the plains, the landowner encounters a new reality that changes his mind: A mestiza <\/i>(mixed-race) woman, <\/i>the eponymous Do\u00f1a B\u00e1rbara, <\/i>has used her feminine wiles to usurp vast tracts of land, including a portion of the Luzardo estate. For the rest of the novel, Santos will remain in the plains region to fight the backward forces personified by Do\u00f1a B\u00e1rbara and attempt to instate \u201cprogress.<\/p>\n

What I do wish to propose is that regionalism, <\/i>no matter how fixated on local color, responded to concerns that were far from provincial.<\/p>\n

Santos Luzardo\u2019s voyage to the plains is emblematic of the homecoming staged by Spanish American fiction beginning in the 1910s, one known in broad terms as regionalism. As an umbrella term for various subcurrents, such as criollismo<\/i>, la novela tel\u00farica<\/i>, and la novela de la tierra<\/i>, Spanish American regionalism marked a decisive phase in the continent\u2019s literary production.<\/p>\n

In broad terms, whereas a previous generation of poets and novelists had faced outward to embrace European aesthetic forms, objects, and civilizational ideals, early twentieth-century regionalisms turned inward, <\/i>to identify and incorporate local or homegrown materials for literary expression. As an example of this shift, one of the dominant literary currents of the late nineteenth century, Spanish American modernismo<\/i>, had famously showcased references to French authors (Paul Val\u00e9ry or the Goncourt brothers), interminable catalogues of bibelots, and sumptuously decorated interiors. Early twentieth-century regionalism, however, inverted this Europhilic aesthetic.<\/p>\n

On a spatial level, foreign or urban spaces gave way to rural ones. As an extension of this logic, the satyrs, nymphs, and marble statues that populated previous modernista <\/i>texts such as the Nicaraguan poet Rub\u00e9n Dar\u00edo\u2019s Azul <\/i>(1888) were exchanged for \u201cbronzed\u201d oarsmen, bongos, and ranch hands. On a larger level, Spanish American modernismo\u2019s dedication to art for art\u2019s sake, particularly via poetry, gave way to an attempt to evoke local reality\u2014<\/i>and, more specifically, rural reality\u2014by way of the novel.<\/p>\n

When tasked with explaining why this homecoming took place when it did, critics have often relied on a narrative of cultural identity. As a well-known story goes, regionalists looked to the rural to find \u201ctraditional\u201d materials with which to craft a more authentic national or regionwide literary aesthetic. Carlos Alonso has shown, in a deconstructionist vein, how this claim to authenticity was always something of a ruse, as texts themselves constantly undermined their own authority.<\/p>\n

But such interpretations, while in some ways quite helpful, are incomplete insofar as they do not attempt to account for the larger structural dynamics at play in the regionalist turn inward and, as a result, the precise ways that novels might have encoded the transition occurring in societies across Latin America in the early twentieth century.<\/p>\n

At the very least, regionalism marked a spatial recalibration in the literary imaginary, away from European metropoles and national capitals and toward rural hinterlands. Going a step further, this spatial recalibration itself anticipated a larger economic transition: a move away from a liberal, export model that principally served foreign markets and toward the foundation of a long-delayed and stunted domestic market. <\/i>In proposing that we look at the material lineaments of regionalism, I do not mean to propose, of course, that literary texts evoked economic transitions in a transparent or straightforward manner: The mediations between texts and social contexts remain to be uncovered and examined.<\/p>\n

Nor do I mean to suggest that the previous emphasis on foreign themes and settings automatically occluded social realities, while the turn toward autochthonous ones automatically elucidated them. To the contrary, the foreign-inspired modernista salon might alert us to the real conditions governing Latin American artistic production (and societies) in a moment of export-oriented capitalist modernization. Conversely, the regionalist emphasis on local settings might just as easily occlude those conditions. What I do wish to propose is that regionalism, <\/i>no matter how fixated on local color, responded to concerns that were far from provincial.<\/p>\n

The colonial latifundium, instead of being abolished by independence, was strengthened, leading to any number of national ills.<\/p>\n

But if the hypothesis that the regionalist search for the national bases of culture broadly anticipated a new, national phase of capitalist accumulation in Latin America, it remains to be stated why, on the level of manifest content, this search took place in the rural hinterlands of the nationstate, and not, say, in expanding cities. As I explore throughout this chapter, early twentieth-century regionalist novels were drawn to the rural world not because it was a site of stable tradition (though this is often the ideological effect they produce), but because this world had become a problem in need of a solution. This problem was none other than the agrarian problem in its earliest instantiation, especially with respect to what was perhaps the key unifying feature of an otherwise intensely variegated Latin American countryside: the persistence of the large estate or latifundium (latifundio).<\/p>\n

So long as export economies dominated, the large estate had not been a pressing problem for elites or the state. In some cases, preexisting latifundia were modernized and adapted to the needs of export commodity production, frequently on the basis of outright slavery or any number of coercive arrangements like debt peonage and sharecropping. In others, the weak state of the internal market allowed them to persist, seemingly unperturbed by either economic exigency or the legal norms of the state.<\/p>\n

But with the decadence of the export model in the early twentieth century, the large estate did indeed become a problem; in some quarters, it became the <\/i>pressing problem facing Latin American societies. As an indication of its scope, scores of tracts began to be published in the early decades of the twentieth century bearing names such as Mexico\u2019s Rural Problem <\/i>(1917), The Problem of Agricultural Production <\/i>(Chile, 1919), Agrarian Questions <\/i>(Argentina, 1921), and El latifundio <\/i>(Venezuela, 1937). Tellingly, despite the national differences such texts reflect, all begin with the exact same premise: The colonial latifundium, instead of being abolished by independence, was strengthened, leading to any number of national ills.<\/p>\n

These included, depending on the country, the nonproductive monopolization of land by an absentee landed class, the stunting of national markets, and, in many cases, the brutal oppression of peasants tethered to estates. And while authors would propose different solutions to this problem depending on their political leanings, they all agreed on the intractable nature of the large estate as the veritable cornerstone of the Latin American agrarian question.<\/p>\n

The question of the large estate was also the cornerstone of the regionalist novel. Much like the Latin American countryside itself, the particularity mobilized by the Spanish American regionalist novel unfolded against a backdrop of a single institution: the large estate. Two of the three best-known examples of 1920s Spanish American regionalism, both studied in this chapter, have landowners as their protagonists: Gallegos\u2019s Do\u00f1a B\u00e1rbara <\/i>and Ricardo G\u00fciraldes\u2019s Don Segundo Sombra. <\/i>The protagonist of a third paradigmatic example of the genre, Jos\u00e9 Eustacio Rivera\u2019s La vor\u00e1gine <\/i>(The Vortex<\/i>, Colombia, 1924), <\/i>is not a landowner, but an urban poet swept into the violent world of the Amazonian rubber trade.<\/p>\n

As Northrop Frye has remarked, romance tends to be the favored genre of ruling classes, an observation that rings particularly true in Latin America.<\/p>\n

The general tendency toward landed characters returns, however, in lesser-known regionalist novels such as Mariano Latorre\u2019s Zurzulita <\/i>(Chile, 1920) and Enrique Larreta\u2019s Zogoibi <\/i>(Argentina, 1926). Further, the plots of many regionalist novels hinge on the fate of the estate itself, along the lines of inheritance and marriage, modernization schemes, or the appearance of upstart peasants in the landowner\u2019s midst. In this way, the so-called novel of the land is, fundamentally, a novel of and about the latifundio in a moment of transition. The reason is obvious enough: the Latin American novel, when traveling to the countryside in the early decades of the twentieth century, could not avoid the large estate or the landowner.<\/p>\n

This focus on the large estate, in turn, helps explain why regionalism was dominant in Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela but not in Mexico, where mass peasant insurrection in 1910 gave way to a radically different kind of novel, the so-called \u201cnovel of the Mexican Revolution.\u201d Nor was it dominant in the Andes, where indigenous rebellions ramped up throughout the 1920s and 1930s to produce twentieth-century indigenismo. Regionalism, and more specifically criollismo, tended to crop up in contexts where landowner rule had not been fundamentally challenged by the possibility of revolution. Even so, at the very least, the regionalist novel\u2019s gravitation toward the large estate alerts us to a crisis of some sort, one that authors attempted to solve by narrative means.<\/p>\n

But if the early twentieth-century regionalist novel was a novel of and about landowners and the latifundio, this is only a first step of analysis. Placing texts in an economic context allows us to see them in a new light, but it is not an end in itself. Rather, my aim in the following pages is to show how a set of novels by Gallegos and G\u00fciraldes posed and answered agrarian questions in a manner that only the novel could, on the level of aesthetic form. As critics such as Antonio Candido have remarked, regionalism was at bottom an attempt to render Latin American reality in its dominant rural guise.<\/p>\n

And indeed, the novels chosen for study in this chapter all take a concrete rural reality as a point of departure: concretely, the latifundio as a problem in need of a solution. What is most intriguing about the novels examined here, however, is that they can\u2019t take the path of either naturalism (a literary mode in vogue at the time) or realism; instead, they can only solve their problems through flight into an older, fantasy-laden region of romance. As Northrop Frye has remarked, romance tends to be the favored genre of ruling classes, an observation that rings particularly true in Latin America. At the same time, though, because these twentieth-century novels take reality as a point of departure, they can\u2019t function purely as romances either.<\/p>\n

Taking a cue from Roberto Schwarz\u2019s analyses of nineteenth-century Brazilian literature, I propose that the aesthetic disunity that characterizes these novels sheds light on a wider social dynamic, one that, as I explore below, stretches from the rural estate to the most abstract realms of the global market. For while novels by G\u00fciraldes and Gallegos present us with rather naked class apologetics that confirm the goodness of landowners, their wildly contradictory textual dynamics attest to something far less obvious and self-assured: on the one hand, social contradictions that refuse to be banished and, on the other, the reactionary energies regularly called forth to contain any attempt at change.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From <\/i>Agrarian Questions<\/a>. Used with the permission of the publisher, Verso Books. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Ericka Beckman<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We begin in medias res, along a path traveled by a landowner. In the opening pages of R\u00f3mulo Gallegos\u2019s landmark 1929 novel Do\u00f1a B\u00e1rbara, the novel\u2019s protagonist, Santos Luzardo, travels toward his ancestral estate deep in the plains region of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31866,"featured_media":276370,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43101,43070,43092],"tags":[112098,112096,112097,576,112100,12702,112099,3147],"class_list":["post-276364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-newsandculture","tag-agrarian-novels","tag-agrarian-questions","tag-ericka-beckman","tag-history","tag-latifundio","tag-latin-america","tag-novels-in-spanish","tag-verso-books"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Tu","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/right-sidebar-banner-images-2026-08-28T134333.833.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31866"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276212,"date":"2026-09-04T05:06:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276212"},"modified":"2026-09-04T06:35:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T10:35:23","slug":"on-edmond-albius-the-enslaved-man-who-pioneered-the-pollination-of-vanilla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-edmond-albius-the-enslaved-man-who-pioneered-the-pollination-of-vanilla\/","title":{"rendered":"On Edmond Albius, the Enslaved Man Who Pioneered the Pollination of Vanilla"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ferr\u00e9ol Bellier-Beaumont recounts the 1841 eureka moment\u2014when a vanilla plant was first manually pollinated\u2014as follows:<\/p>\n

One day as I walked with my faithful companion, I noticed that my only vanilla plant had produced a […] bean. I expressed surprise and brought it to his attention. He told me he had pollinated the flower. I refused to believe him and walked on. But two or three days later, I saw a second pod growing near the first. He then repeated his assertion. I asked him how he had done it. He proceeded to execute the operation that everyone now does. The intelligent child had been able to discern, in a same flower, the male and female organs, and put them properly in contact with one another.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Using a needle or a toothpick, Edmond had successfully placed the two organs in contact, in a gesture that has since become second nature to vanilla growers around the world. If the withered flower stayed attached to the extremity of the \u201cembryo,\u201d added Bellier-Beaumont, the operation had succeeded and ten months to a year later pods would grow. Subsequently, Edmond\u2019s technique was rendered in simple sketches. Here was a transparent and simple method, rapidly achieved with the help of only a needle.<\/p>\n

In a moment of revelation, the enslaved student used clear instructional tools to proudly show the technique to his master.<\/p>\n

This relation of Edmond\u2019s breakthrough elicits several observations. For one thing, Edmond had gone from Ferr\u00e9ol\u2019s \u201cfavorite\u201d to his \u201cfaithful companion.\u201d What exactly did this mean? Megan Vaughan has suggested that on neighboring Isle of France, \u201csmall-scale slave ownership sometimes necessitated a degree of identification, even intimacy between master and slave.\u201d The Beaumont estate met these conditions, with its modest number of bondage workers. However, as Vaughan goes on to show, \u201cidentification\u201d did not necessarily foster compassion; if anything, it could be self-interested. And so, it should come as no surprise that the Bellier-Beaumont family never freed Edmond via manumission.<\/p>\n

Next, Bellier-Beaumont\u2019s testimony shows that Edmond\u2019s method was in many respects the antithesis of Morren\u2019s. Straightforward, transparent, and stage-based, it presented none of the Belgian\u2019s elliptical, secretive language. Third, the power inversion contained in this moment was palpable: try as Ferr\u00e9ol Bellier-Beaumont might to suggest his pumpkins and candle bush had served as inspiration, Edmond\u2019s discovery was not the fruit of Socratic dialogue. After all, Ferr\u00e9ol had initially refused to believe Edmond\u2019s claim. In a moment of revelation, the enslaved student used clear instructional tools to proudly show the technique to his master.<\/p>\n

Thereafter, Ferr\u00e9ol is said to have placed an announcement in a local newspaper explaining the method. However, his description proved too vague, and local planters came calling for greater details. Demand was such that Edmond went on tour, achieving something close to celebrity status. Bellier-Beaumont mentions that planters arranged for Edmond to visit their estates using \u201cvery comfortable\u201d means of locomotion \u201cto which he was not accustomed.\u201d This was likely a horse-drawn carriage, or perhaps a sedan chair carried by fellow slaves. Edmond presented his pollination technique in person at several plantations, including those of Patu de Rosemond at Saint-Beno\u00eet, David de Floris at Saint-Andr\u00e9, Joseph Desbassayns at Sainte-Suzanne, and Mr. Vinet at Sainte-Marie. One can imagine the reactions of audience members and especially enslaved onlookers, overhearing one of their own arriving by carriage before delivering a lecture on how to pollinate a recently introduced flower before local dignitaries and gardeners alike. They must have been transfixed. This was more than breaking a glass ceiling; it was straining the shackles of slavery, shaking its very foundations.<\/p>\n

Although Edmond\u2019s story is unique, for enslaved people to possess botanical knowledge was not. On Bourbon, maroons discovered the medicinal properties of many highland plants, some of which retain Malagasy names today, and shared their knowledge with those still enslaved. In the Americas, many a plant varietal was introduced by enslaved Africans, and some of them managed to continue independent production of such crops. Also in the Western Hemisphere, enslaved Africans\u2019 proficiency at herbalism fused with Indigenous American knowledge to generate rich homeopathic cultures. The enslaved both prospected for remedies and conducted experimentation. Forms of slave knowledge, overlaid on Indigenous ones, were influential in treating dysentery and elaborating antidotes for poisonings. Such treatments, in turn, circulated between islands and continents, including between rival colonial empires. Enslaved women were often their carriers.<\/p>\n

Some enslaved people not only made medical-botanical breakthroughs but also received recognition for their work. Such was the case with Quassie in eighteenth-century Suriname. Informed in part by dialogue with Indigenous healers, he discovered the fever-reducing properties of a local tree. By the 1740s, he was healing fellow slaves with a decoction derived from its bark. Over time, whites began adopting the remedy, and in 1753, the eminent Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus named the tree Quassia amara. Quassie eventually gained freedom not on the basis of his discovery but for helping the colonial authorities track down maroons.<\/p>\n

Back in the Indian Ocean, on Isle of France in the 1770s, the king\u2019s intendant Pierre Poivre entrusted the enslaved Bengali Charles Rama with the post of head gardener at his jardin d\u2019acclimatation<\/em>. Poivre especially appreciated Rama\u2019s mastery of nutmeg, which he considered to be unrivaled among Europeans. According to Dorit Brixius, this reflected a growing \u201ccreolization of expertise\u201d in the Mascarenes.<\/p>\n

This was more than breaking a glass ceiling; it was straining the shackles of slavery, shaking its very foundations.<\/p>\n

Even closer to home, on Bourbon, one finds other examples of specialized enslaved botanists. Thus, in 1791, planter Joseph Hubert assigned the task of protecting a clove tree to one of his enslaved gardeners, Jean-Louis. Seeing the commitment Jean-Louis showed defending the tree in the middle of a hurricane, Hubert decided to free him. The speech he delivered for Jean-Louis\u2019s manumission on March 27, 1791, is worth quoting. He offered him a wage, adding, \u201cI know you wish to stay in my garden. I, too, hope that you won\u2019t abandon the care of the precious plantations that you and I have raised together, and which are our children.\u201d He then credited Pierre Poivre and Poivre\u2019s spouse with his decision to manumit. To Pierre Poivre he owed the cloves and other spices he cultivated, which the famed intendant had brought to Isle of France. To his widow, he owed a portrait of said Pierre Poivre, \u201ca gift which prompted my decision to move forward the moment of your manumission.\u201d Rarely are motivations so clearly attributed in such cases. Poivre\u2019s philosophy, merging Enlightenment ideals with an environmental sensibility and a commitment to ending slavery, had been the main movers in this case. So, too, was a kind of botanical fraternity.<\/p>\n

Edmond\u2019s story does not exactly match those of Rama, Quassie, or Jean-Louis. His discovery was not strictly medical, although vanilla was used for some treatments. He did not bring knowhow to Bourbon from afar, nor did he benefit from Indigenous knowledge, nor was he freed for his achievement. The vine he pollinated was exogenous to Bourbon, as were people for that matter, as the previously uninhabited island was first visited only in 1613 and the initial French settlement attempts occurred in 1638, only two centuries before Edmond\u2019s discovery. Yet Edmond\u2019s invention helped transform the vanilla economy, taking it from a niche Mexican spice to a global commodity. Still, the concept of the creolization of expertise is useful for thinking about Edmond. Based on the available evidence, it would seem that he combined the botanical skills he learned from Ferr\u00e9ol Bellier-Beaumont with practical experiments on his estate and supplemented this with herbal and agricultural knowledge he gained through oral transmission.<\/p>\n

Unlike Joseph Hubert with Jean-Louis, neither Ferr\u00e9ol Bellier-Beaumont nor his sister ever freed Edmond. One can speculate that they did not want to lose one of the small number of enslaved laborers they had or that they may have turned a profit off of Edmond\u2019s local notoriety, perhaps charging a fee for his presentations to other planters. But this is little more than an educated guess. What we know for certain is that Edmond gained liberty through the second and final abolition of slavery pronounced in Paris by the Second Republic in 1848. The renamed isle of R\u00e9union, definitively shedding its royal connection to the Bourbons, received a new lead official, General Commissioner to the Republic Joseph Sarda Garriga. On October 18, 1848, he published the earlier decrees of April 27, 1848, abolishing slavery once and for all in French colonies. One local newspaper that ran the proclamation still featured a suddenly obsolete ad to rent out fifteen enslaved workers.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From <\/em>Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean<\/a> by Eric T. Jennings. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from Yale University Press. <\/em>Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean has been shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ferr\u00e9ol Bellier-Beaumont recounts the 1841 eureka moment\u2014when a vanilla plant was first manually pollinated\u2014as follows: One day as I walked with my faithful companion, I noticed that my only vanilla plant had produced a […] bean. I expressed surprise and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31827,"featured_media":276221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101,43231,43092],"tags":[111978,1011,10954,60417,112020,112017,8819,2727,112018,12455],"class_list":["post-276212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-nature","category-newsandculture","tag-2026-cundill-history-prize","tag-africa","tag-botany","tag-cundill-history-prize","tag-edmond-albius","tag-eric-t-jennings","tag-plants","tag-slavery","tag-vanilla-the-history-of-an-extraordinary-bean","tag-yale-university-press","story-type-cundill-history-prize"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19R2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Edmond_Albius-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31827"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":270948,"date":"2026-09-04T05:00:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=270948"},"modified":"2026-09-04T06:35:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T10:35:12","slug":"how-the-fanatical-legion-of-mary-secreted-young-girls-away-to-toil-in-irelands-magdalene-laundries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-the-fanatical-legion-of-mary-secreted-young-girls-away-to-toil-in-irelands-magdalene-laundries\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Fanatical Legion of Mary Secreted Young Girls Away to Toil in Ireland\u2019s Magdalene Laundries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fifteen-year-old Eileen disappeared on a quiet Sunday evening in February 1954. She was at work when it happened. Eileen was a maid at a bed-and-breakfast in a large Georgian townhouse in inner-city Dublin, where she remade the crumpled beds, bundled the laundry into bags, ready to be collected, and smoothed the white linens across the breakfast tables. Each week she was paid ten shillings, and she lived in the small maid\u2019s quarters located in the attic of the B&B. This was not just a handy living arrangement but a necessary one. Dublin was not Eileen\u2019s hometown; she had arrived in the capital the year before as a runaway, escaping a life that she could not bear.<\/p>\n

Eileen was born in 1939 at a Mother and Baby Home. These Homes were clandestine institutions run by Catholic nuns, places for women and girls who had had sex outside marriage, and found themselves pregnant, which was a catastrophic social taboo. Ideally, after the baby was born, the mother would leave them behind. She then returned to her normal life carrying her private shame, but with her social standing intact. The nuns then took it upon themselves to make arrangements for the illegitimate child.<\/p>\n

Illegitimacy <\/i>is an ugly word, but in Ireland at the time it was a legal category assigned at birth. For most of the twentieth century, the Irish government counted the number of illegitimate babies and tracked their year-on-year growth or hoped-for decline. They scrutinized this in comparison to the levels of illegitimacy in other countries, particularly their close neighbor, Britain, which was also doing the same dismal demographic calculus. The size of Ireland\u2019s illegitimate population was lamented in government like an ill-gotten under-class. By the time Eileen was born, the matter of illegitimacy was a permanent social anxiety.<\/p>\n

Eileen remembered how she adored her mother and loved to see her arrive at the house, but also how quickly she learned that she was expected to contain that feeling.<\/p>\n

Eileen\u2019s mother had been working as a live-in domestic maid for a well-heeled family when she found out she was pregnant. The father of her baby was the husband, the man of the house. So this problem\u2014and certainly no one was say-ing that this pregnancy was anything other than a problem\u2014was hers alone.<\/p>\n

When Eileen was born, her mother did as was expected and left her at the Mother and Baby institution, where Eileen stayed until she was four years old. Eileen hadn\u2019t been adopted, and so either a family member would have to come and retrieve her, or she would be sent to the industrial school\u2014a dire place for poor orphaned children, also run by religious orders. Eileen\u2019s mother was by then working elsewhere in the country, so in the end it was her married sister, Sheila, who came to collect the little girl. Auntie Sheila said she would raise Eileen alongside her own, older stepson.<\/p>\n

Eileen\u2019s mother visited whenever she could get leave from her domestic duties. Eileen remembered how she adored her mother and loved to see her arrive at the house, but also how quickly she learned that she was expected to contain that feeling. During her mother\u2019s infrequent visits, Eileen was to treat her with no more than polite formality. Recalling these years, she said, \u201cI was never allowed to speak to her alone when she came to see me.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Eileen was illegitimate and a source of great shame for the family, her aunt tried to muffle signs of her presence. When the family traveled by horse and carriage through the town, Eileen was made to curl up in the footwell, where she was covered by a blanket. She was not allowed to attend the local school and was made to travel to a school in another town where her family was not known.<\/p>\n

Home life was where the danger lay for Eileen. Auntie Sheila\u2019s stepson was vicious and sexually predatory. Eileen hardly knew what was happening to her, but she came to dread whenever her aunt announced that she and her husband were heading out, leaving Eileen alone with her step-cousin.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat cruel life,\u201d as Eileen described it, went on until she was thirteen, when she was taken out of school, her education over. Auntie Sheila had arranged for Eileen to be sent to work as a domestic for a local farmer who had a gaggle of children and endless errands to be done. The life of live-in servitude flummoxed Eileen, who said that her \u201cblood ran into water.\u201d She became lifeless. Within months, she was back with Auntie Sheila, laid out in bed for days on end, trying to recuperate.<\/p>\n

What Auntie Sheila seemed to learn from this episode was that the demanding combination of children and the farm had pushed Eileen too far. Once she was upright again, Eileen was sent to one of the nearby big houses, the stately-looking homes of the landed gentry or respectable and monied classes\u2014the doctors, the vets, the big farmers. There, she had no lands to tend to and no children to monitor and feed.<\/p>\n

People sometimes gently mocked them and their small intrusions by dismissing them as \u201cHoly Joes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, Eileen spent day after day down on her knees scrubbing that grand house until she felt something in her yield; she was fourteen and a half when she ran away to Dublin. She said that she \u201cloved\u201d the bed-and-breakfast; she liked the two other girls who worked there because they were from the country as well, and that the owner, Miss Mullins, was usually milling about the place too. If her dream had been to live a life of her own making, she seemed to have succeeded.<\/p>\n

Then, on that Sunday evening in February, Miss Mullins was out. With her gone, the other two girls vanished up the stairs as they hurried to dress for a dance in town that evening, Eileen recalled. Since she wasn\u2019t joining them, Eileen found herself alone in the bed-and-breakfast.<\/p>\n

Two unremarkable-looking middle-aged women came in from the street and approached Eileen at the front desk. She did not know them, and they were not guests. Many years later she would find out that they were members of the Legion of Mary, a volunteer organization whose lives were devoted to the veneration and imitation of Mary, the Mother of God and Blessed Virgin, who exemplified purity and a sinless life. The Legion of Mary saw themselves as an army engaged in a perpetual \u201cwarfare\u201d against \u201cthe world and its evil powers\u201d; their only mission was to guard Ireland\u2019s moral boundaries.<\/p>\n

In their self-appointed position as neighborhood apostles, their members pounded the pavements, identifying people who might need to be saved from vice, from sin, from potential proselytism by Protestant charities. They set about \u201cinfluencing every home, shop, factory, office, and every other place its members might be set by circumstances.\u201d In this wide-reaching role, they sometimes sidled up to young girls on the street whom they suspected of wayward tendencies, who exhibited signs of what they described as \u201cpre-delinquency,\u201d whose downfall seemed dangerously imminent, and to whom they must issue their warnings about evil. People sometimes gently mocked them and their small intrusions by dismissing them as \u201cHoly Joes.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were numerous similar groups devoted to the Virgin Mary, but the Legion of Mary was the most prevalent.<\/p>\n

From their foundation in 1921, officials in the Irish Catholic Church treated the Legion with caution, but they quickly earned enormous popularity with diehard Catholics. They held public meetings that were attended by ever-increasing crowds, and their membership grew exponentially into a \u201cLegion of Mary frenzy.\u201d One mother had written to the Archbishop in the 1920s, not long after the Legion of Mary was founded. This woman was worried about her daughters who had become swept up in this obsessive new group.<\/p>\n

She had kept a secluded schedule, unlike her workmates, Eileen said; as she \u201cnever went out and never done anything wrong,\u201d she had nothing to fear.<\/p>\n

Despite rearing them as \u201cgood Catholics,\u201d this desperate mother wrote, since her daughters had joined the Legion of Mary, they had been treating her and her husband as though they were \u201cno longer good enough Catholics in their estimation.\u201d Their concerns faded into a minority view. By the 1950s, the Legion lived up to their name and had garnered a twenty-five-thousand-strong membership.<\/p>\n

The Catholic Church eventually came to share the Legion of Mary\u2019s outlook, and the Pope had declared that 1954 was going to be the Marian year. The Virgin Mary and her immaculate conception were to be celebrated, and perhaps no other nation threw themselves into the veneration of Mary that year quite like the Irish. The post office issued a series of special stamps to mark the occasion, while people painted the entirety of their houses, inside and out, in bright shades of \u201cMarian blue.\u201d A new statue-building craze saw Marian grottos erected across the country, tucking figures of the Mother of God into rockfaces and roadsides.<\/p>\n

On desolate rural strips or town squares, Mary is always the same. Hands clasped, head bowed, blank and fair of face. Each statue the perfect epitome of silent, mothering, virginal womanhood that Ireland had come to worship. Apparently, Protestants looked on and thought the Catholics, and maybe the Irish in particular, were hardly Christian at all, as they obsessed so over Mary. In Ireland, Christ sometimes had the appearance of a second-tier messiah in his own religion.<\/p>\n

It was this kind of obsequious zeal that possessed the two women now standing before Eileen in 1954\u2014Holy Joes that had been roving the city\u2019s streets in search of women and girls in imminent moral danger, and believed that they had found one in Eileen. They immediately pursued a peculiar, almost personal, line of conversation.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou are far too good to be working here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd too nice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could bring you to a nicer place to work, with more money.\u201d<\/p>\n

From that moment on she was to be known only as \u201c60.\u201d In the days that followed, everything else was stripped from her.<\/p>\n

Eileen was not sure what it was these two women were really talking about, but she did not ask them to clarify. She had been raised in the traditional Irish way, in which deference and obedience to your elders were paramount\u2014she knew that she was not meant to ask questions, especially of people who possessed an air of authority, as these two women did. But even in her silence, Eileen did not feel a warning sense of suspicion, or recognize the sinister edge to this confrontation. She had kept a secluded schedule, unlike her workmates, Eileen said; as she \u201cnever went out and never done anything wrong,\u201d she had nothing to fear.<\/p>\n

The two women insisted that there was no time to waste, and that Eileen should come with them immediately. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what to do,\u201d Eileen said. \u201cI was reared up very strict, and you didn\u2019t say no in them days. In the fifties you didn\u2019t say no, you\u2019d be afraid to say no. So, I said okay.\u201d Fifteen-year-old Eileen followed them out of the bed-and-breakfast and got into their car, which was parked just outside. Eileen sat in the back seat as they drove her to O\u2019Connell Street, the city\u2019s main thoroughfare. They crossed the bridge over the River Liffey, and went out the other side of town.<\/p>\n

Did she begin to wonder if she ought to have waited to tell Miss Mullins? She hadn\u2019t so much as left a note; presumably Eileen believed she would return. It didn\u2019t take long before they were in a part of Dublin Eileen did not know. They passed salubrious redbrick houses with long gravel driveways set in off the road. The car slowed as it reached a lively street, and when the traffic eased, they pulled right and went through a gate with an arched metal sign above it: saint mary magdaLens asyLum. This was not hidden or tucked away; it sat among the row of ordinary local businesses: butcher, dairy, post office, pub, Magdalene Laundry.<\/p>\n

They led her up a set of shimmery limestone steps. A nun in pitch-black robes appeared at the door, who showed them through to a parlor, a grand and dignified room where the nuns received guests and hosted events. Whatever task these two women had set out upon was now complete, because they turned to leave. Before they did, one of them paused and looked back at Eileen, who was still standing in obedient silence, and said, \u201cWe\u2019re putting you in here for your own safety.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finding Eileen gone, the girls she worked with did not call the police. It is likely that the Legion of Mary returned and explained matters to Miss Mullins. Maybe, like Eileen, Miss Mullins knew not to ask questions either. Perhaps privately she felt annoyed about the inconvenience of having to hire another girl, but thanked them nonetheless. We will never know exactly what occurred in the wake of Eileen\u2019s absence. There is no archive for quiet moments of compliance and inaction. Something along these lines must have happened, because no one came looking for Eileen.<\/p>\n

Later that evening, the nun took Eileen\u2019s clothes, then cut off her hair and changed her name. She was no longer Eileen; she was to be designated by a number. From that moment on she was to be known only as \u201c60.\u201d In the days that followed, everything else was stripped from her.<\/p>\n

Where she was and what was happening would take her weeks to figure out. Why it had happened, that would take decades to be revealed.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland\u2019s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence<\/a> by Louise Brangan. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Louise Brangan. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fifteen-year-old Eileen disappeared on a quiet Sunday evening in February 1954. She was at work when it happened. Eileen was a maid at a bed-and-breakfast in a large Georgian townhouse in inner-city Dublin, where she remade the crumpled beds, bundled<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29404,"featured_media":270951,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101,43092,43095,43360],"tags":[4610,1625,82530,110056,110057,731,110055,110058],"class_list":["post-270948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-newsandculture","category-politics","category-religion","tag-catholicism","tag-ireland","tag-irish-history","tag-louise-brangan","tag-magdalene-laundries","tag-simon-and-schuster","tag-the-fallen-the-lost-girls-of-irelands-magdalene-laundries-and-a-legacy-of-silence","tag-virgin-mary"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-18u8","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/longform-banner-32.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29404"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276623,"date":"2026-09-03T14:26:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T18:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276623"},"modified":"2026-09-03T14:26:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T18:26:07","slug":"a-new-font-promises-to-hide-your-text-from-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/a-new-font-promises-to-hide-your-text-from-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"A new font promises to hide your text from AI."},"content":{"rendered":"

Can you read the text above? Because large language models can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The design and tech company Mixfont has created Decoy Font<\/a>, which promises to hide your text from AI crawlers. As covered in Dezeen<\/a>, the font works by using two layers for each letter, a clear outline and then a darker, blurred shape underneath. Humans are able to parse both layers\u2014try squinting or stepping back\u2014 but AIs can\u2019t. (This is Mixfont\u2019s second experiment with AI-proofing text. Their first was Ghost Font<\/a>, a sort of nausea inducing font that hides by moving.)<\/p>\n

\u201cMost AI systems work by reading the pixels of an image up close,\u201d according to Mixfont,<\/a> \u201cSo when this type of image is pasted into an AI model\u2026the LLM focuses on the foreground text because that is what is most clearly outlined.\u201d It\u2019s a clever, lo-fi way to break AI models’ ability to process your writing.<\/p>\n

I like this experiment, both as a design object and as a creative way to resist AI. Plus I love camouflage (sorry to my friends who have heard a lot about dazzle ships) and I hate AI. Unfortunately, Mixfont is hardly a fellow militant in the anti-AI resistance.\u00a0The company describes<\/a> itself as \u201can AI-powered digital font foundry,\u201d and most of their tools let users AI generate synthetic fonts (based on other people\u2019s design work, presumably).<\/p>\n

Mixfont’s AI-resistant design experiments are part of their broader work in AI, a way \u201cto test the limits of what LLMs would easily solve,\u201d Mixfont founder Eric Lu told Dezeen.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI think the reaction to the font shows that there are many folks who feel strong AI fatigue,\u201d Lu said, \u201cand want a way to defend themselves against the presence of AI in their lives.\u201d You\u2019re preaching to the choir, my friend! It’s not too late to repent.<\/p>\n

You can play around with Decoy Font and read more about the methodology on Mixfont\u2019s website.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can you read the text above? Because large language models can\u2019t. The design and tech company Mixfont has created Decoy Font, which promises to hide your text from AI crawlers. As covered in Dezeen, the font works by using two<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17056,"featured_media":276625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43099,43092,43445,43646],"tags":[20922,18017,327,53324,112160,112161,8302],"class_list":["post-276623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-newsandculture","category-newsandculture","category-technology","category-the-hub","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-design","tag-fonts","tag-llm","tag-ned-ludds-army","tag-tech"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19XF","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/decoy-font.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17056"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276593,"date":"2026-09-03T11:17:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T15:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276593"},"modified":"2026-09-03T11:17:54","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T15:17:54","slug":"remembering-gloria-steinem-author-and-agent-of-the-second-wave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/remembering-gloria-steinem-author-and-agent-of-the-second-wave\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Gloria Steinem, author and agent of the second wave."},"content":{"rendered":"

Gloria Steinem, the trailblazing feminist journalist best known for embodying the American second wave, has died at 92.<\/p>\n

Steinem was a co-founder of Ms<\/a>.<\/em>, a magazine that debuted the honorific unrelated to marital status. From 1971 to 1987, monthly issues of Ms. <\/em>found their way into desperate living rooms, where they radicalized and consoled girls and women. The mag ran endorsements for both Shirley Chisholm<\/a> and a re-empowered Wonder Woman<\/a>. It broke stories about the wage gap, the Equal Rights Amendment, date rape, and domestic violence.<\/p>\n

Many articles in its pages set the national tone for the (late) Roe v. Wade<\/em> ruling, including the famous open letter<\/a> that ran in 1971. Aiming to de-stigmatize abortion and demanding “a repeal of all laws that restrict our reproductive freedom,” the letter was signed by dozens of celebrities who admitted to having abortions\u2014including Susan Sontag, Nora Ephron, Lillian Hellman, and Billie Jean King.<\/p>\n

Steinem typified and took flack for embodying a very specific femininity. As a cis, white, straight, thin, conventionally beautiful person, her early activism centered conundrums specific to those categories. (See: her 1963 expose in Show<\/em> magazine, “A Bunny’s Tale<\/a>,” reporting on indignities at the Playboy Club.) The Black feminist Alice Walker famously left Ms.<\/em> over elitism charges in the 80s. But Gloria’s personal remit and multicultural commitments grew wider over her career.<\/p>\n

After shifting up the Ms.<\/em> masthead, she turned to activism. And per Belinda Luscombe’s remembrance in Time,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

She campaigned on behalf of native people, was arrested while protesting apartheid, publicly opposed the first Gulf War, advocated for disarmament in Korea, spoke against child abuse, female genital mutilation and pornography, and was an early supporter of LGB rights. (It took her a little longer<\/a> to endorse the transgender movement.)<\/p>\n

She found friends in unlikely places, and enemies in the proto-manosphere<\/a>. Her books included My Life on the Road<\/em><\/a>, Revolution From Within<\/em><\/a>, and the forthcoming An Unexpected Life<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I got the chance to meet Gloria back in 2018, when I was an understudy in a play about her life. Emily Mann’s Gloria: A Life<\/em><\/a> was inspired by several of Steinem’s own autobiographies, including My Life on the Road<\/em> and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

All I really knew of Ms. Steinem before jumping into this project could be summed up in signifiers. (Specifically: Playboy, Ms.,<\/em> and Aviator sunglasses<\/a>.) Despite my awareness of this image<\/a>, there was also the dim sense that her kind of glamorous feminism didn’t directly apply to the kind my grandmothers had needed. I was excited, that’s to say\u2014but a little skeptical. Anyway, they say to never meet your heroes.<\/p>\n

When we walked into the first read-through, Gloria was fluttering around the space, giving all the actors bespoke thank you bracelets emblazoned with feminist slogans. (A friend of hers had made these.) She was warm and present and weirdly humble about the task ahead.<\/p>\n

She kept insisting she’d signed up for the biopic treatment for one specific reason: inspired by her work with the late Cherokee Nation leader Wilma Mankiller<\/a>, act two of our play was designed as an open forum “talking circle,” i.e., a space where any audience member might air grievance or offer insight to the end of raising our collective consciousness.<\/p>\n

That will be the best part,<\/em> she kept repeating, dismissing the life story we’d all been hired to interpret. To prove her point, she would come and moderate as many talking circles she could, and on evenings when she was busy changing other lives, other feminist luminaries would be tapped to hold the space.<\/p>\n

Again, I was skeptical. (Audience participation…) But her self-effacement was charming. As we dug into the play and I started connecting the dots about this “life” Gloria kept relegating to the sidelines\u2014from the unstable Ohio childhood, to the landmark stint at the 1977 Women’s Conference<\/a>\u2014I got even more shook. It was hard to imagine living as much as this woman had and not wanting to talk about it.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Her commitment to the cadre, her anti-hierarchical ethos, these things will stay with me. Our play slid off the personal details of Gloria, preferring to center her work. Her points of connection with Bella Abzug<\/a>, Dorothy Pitman Hughes<\/a>, Flo Kennedy<\/a>, and Wilma Mankiller<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the talking circles, Gloria exemplified her lifelong practice. She was a deep listener, frank and curious and welcoming. But whenever anyone thanked her for changing the world, she waved it off. Look around, not up,<\/em> she liked to say of heroes. We build solidarity side to side.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Our show was up and running during the Kavanaugh hearings. There were a few nights following Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony when the talking circle was filled with rage and tears. I remember looking over at this octogenarian icon, chic and robust as ever, as she held the group’s consciousness. All that thorny feeling. All that unruly life<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And I remember thinking, Gloria, you were right. This<\/em> is the best part.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gloria Steinem, the trailblazing feminist journalist best known for embodying the American second wave, has died at 92. Steinem was a co-founder of Ms., a magazine that debuted the honorific unrelated to marital status. From 1971 to 1987, monthly issues<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17066,"featured_media":276600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43102,43109,43101,43103,43092,43095,43098,43646],"tags":[112153,45886,112149,53453,112148,71369,1044,112145,10777,5080,72349,90332,24187,11202,24185,112146,64161,112147,21486],"class_list":["post-276593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biography","category-events","category-history","category-memoir","category-newsandculture","category-politics","category-style","category-the-hub","tag-a-bunnys-tale","tag-bella-abzug","tag-consciousness-raising","tag-dr-christine-blasey-ford","tag-emily-mann","tag-equal-rights-amendment","tag-feminism","tag-flo-kennedy","tag-gloria-steinem","tag-icons","tag-literary-obituaries","tag-ms-magazine","tag-remembrance","tag-rip","tag-roe-v-wade","tag-second-wave","tag-shirley-chisholm","tag-wilma-mankiller","tag-wonder-woman","book-an-unexpected-life","book-my-life-on-the-road","book-outrageous-acts-and-everyday-rebellions","book-revolution-from-within"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Xb","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Untitled-design-30.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17066"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]