[{"id":275632,"date":"2026-08-20T04:01:52","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T08:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275632"},"modified":"2026-08-20T09:00:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T13:00:08","slug":"claudia-rankine-on-triage-antigone-and-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/claudia-rankine-on-triage-antigone-and-collapse\/","title":{"rendered":"Claudia Rankine on Triage, Antigone, and Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine joins co-hosts Christian Barter, Jennifer Maritza McCauley and Whitney Terrell to talk about her new book <i>Triage<\/i>.\u00a0 Rankine outlines the decades-long relationship between the book\u2019s narrator and a character she names \u201cthe theorist,\u201d who, as college students, develop the habit of collapsing whenever they greet each other. She talks about how each character interprets collapse differently, the theorist prescribing action while the narrator fights for her \u201csilences, routines, and quietude.\u201d Rankine discusses how their \u201cconversation\u201d echoes <i>Antigone<\/i> and is rooted in our current reactions to the war in Gaza and the second Trump Administration. She reflects on the role that visual imagery has in her work and reads from <i>Triage.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"width: 100%; height: 200px; border: 0 none;\" src=\"https:\/\/art19.com\/shows\/9de36b8c-32a9-49c0-9b19-8d98127e539f\/episodes\/d6aadf8a-89f5-454a-b0b7-e317d2c74e7e\/embed\" scrolling=\"no\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/fiction.non.fiction.podcast\/\">Fiction\/Non\/Fiction Instagram account<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UC07g9fxim0XbDM_LhlnCL0w\/featured?disable_polymer=1\">Fiction\/Non\/Fiction YouTube Channel<\/a>, and our show website: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fnfpodcast.net\/\">https:\/\/www.fnfpodcast.net\/<\/a>This podcast is produced by Christian Barter, Jennifer Maritza McCauley, and Whitney Terrell.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><b>Claudia Rankine<\/b><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/moonpalacebooks.com\/item\/gQa9oC6cOlX4Q9cyzFoRGA\"><i>Triage<\/i><\/a> \u2022\u00a0<i><\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/moonpalacebooks.com\/item\/gQa9oC6cOlVdIhbXpoestw\"><i>Don&#8217;t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric<\/i><\/a> \u2022\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/moonpalacebooks.com\/item\/SPJp5aJcEuCiZQjzXSxQVg\"><i>Citizen: An American Lyric<\/i><\/a> \u2022\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/moonpalacebooks.com\/item\/gQa9oC6cOlUWK6F5MVuCPg\"><i>Just Us: An American Conversation<\/i><\/a><i><\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><b>Others<\/b><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/moonpalacebooks.com\/item\/9ZxRdsPjgutZ_LorwiGRmQ\"><i>Antigone<\/i> | Sophocles<\/a> \u2022\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/omar-el-akkad-on-gaza-and-western-empire\/\">Fiction\/Non\/Fiction Season 8, Episode 51: Omar El Akkad on Gaza and Western Empire<\/a> \u2022\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0076245\/\"><i> Julia<\/i><\/a> (1977) dir. Fred Zinnemann<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><b>EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION <\/b><b>WITH CLAUDIA RANKINE<\/b><\/p>\n<p><b>Whitney Terrell: <\/b>Speaking of Antigone, there&#8217;s a scene later in the book where the narrator goes to the bathroom and reaches into her basket of books beside the toilet and reads some Antigone. The narrator is then driven to write a letter to the theorist, and that letter refers to various policies of the second Trump term.<\/p>\n<p>She&#8217;s mimicking what they think, what the government is doing, right? No to trans people. No to choice. No to refugees. No to employment. No to FEMA. No to U.S. and USAID. No to free speech. And then in response to these policies, the narrator reaches back into Antigone, which she had just read, and says, &#8220;Shouldn&#8217;t our response at least echo what&#8217;s already been said? Be whatever you want, and I will bury you. It seems fair to me to die doing it.&#8221; Could you unpack that passage for us and talk about how it relates to this dialectic between the narrator and the theorist that you were just talking about?<\/p>\n<p><b>Claudia Rankine: <\/b>I teach at NYU, and I was so impressed by the students, their willingness to risk everything in service of their support for Gaza and for other things, as well. Then we look at a place like Minnesota and how people have shown up to the point of risking their lives and losing their lives. I really feel that in this moment, that is what is being asked of us. Are you willing to risk everything for anyone?<\/p>\n<p>I felt like the rise up in that passage that I read had to do with the importance of demonstration at this point, the importance of showing up, which is ironic that the narrator is saying this because the narrator is the one that doesn&#8217;t actually do it, but expects it from the theorist. And to hear the theorist be in a state where the too-muchness of now suddenly has put them in a place where they want to just collapse without rising up disappoints the narrator to the point of anger.<\/p>\n<p><b>Christian Barter:<\/b> In the trilogy, which represents your prior three books, it seems like the reader is constantly aware of the power of language. I think about how in <i>Don&#8217;t Let Me Be Lonely<\/i>, there&#8217;s all these references to the language of drug companies and the language that&#8217;s on TV, the language that&#8217;s on the news after 9\/11, politicians. A lot of it is wielded by dark forces: corporations, politicians, obsessively normative forces, but also by writers and artists and figures in <i>Citizen<\/i>, like Serena Williams, speaking back to the umpires. Or, in <i>Just Us<\/i>, the narrator drawing people out to have these difficult conversations about race.<\/p>\n<p>And in <i>Triage<\/i>, the theorist argues that language is not enough. Do you see this book as an extension of the explorations that you are doing with language in those prior three books, or as in dialog with those books? Does this represent a reversal in or a questioning of what you&#8217;re doing there?<\/p>\n<p><b>CR: <\/b>I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s a reversal because the process of <i>Triage <\/i>is the conversation. I think the American trilogy series was really about can people actually see the condition of the person in front of them? Can they speak to it? Can they talk to each other? Can they explain how they&#8217;re feeling and have a bit of empathy or a bit of history to inform their behavior?<\/p>\n<p>Here, it&#8217;s almost like <i>Triage <\/i>is taking the advice of those books and performing the conversation. The book is actually organized into four conversations: the lecture, but then they have three meetings by the end of the book in which they state their positions and try and also reconnect in terms of their friendship. I really wanted the book not to be an instruction, but a performance.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing that&#8217;s going on now is within families, within friendships, people have come to a stalemate. They refuse to talk to other people because they have different positions, and they see the unwillingness to engage as an action. They cannot perform an action that directly relates to the dead bodies, but they can refuse to engage those who don&#8217;t see how dire the situation is. So I wanted to say maybe let&#8217;s look at what it is to just keep going in these conversations.<\/p>\n<p><b>WT: <\/b>That&#8217;s what I was thinking about. As a novelist, I always remind myself I do not have to agree with my characters, and I also don&#8217;t have to resolve their differences. I just have to allow them to have the discussion, which is what it felt like you were doing in this book here. Did you yourself change in your thinking in the process of allowing these characters to have this discussion?<\/p>\n<p><b>CR: <\/b>Yes, I did. I had an alternative ending, actually, to the book, and I sent it to my publisher as a finished product, and they all loved it, and we were done. And then I wrote them and said, &#8220;You know, that&#8217;s not the right ending,&#8221; and they were like, &#8220;What are you talking about? It&#8217;s the perfect ending.&#8221; So I rewrote the ending and sent it to them, and at first they were like, &#8220;No, this is not right,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Yes, it is right, actually. This is how it goes, in a way. It&#8217;s not as clean as the prior ending. It&#8217;s a different, more complicated, more human, more fallible ending, and that&#8217;s where we&#8217;re going to go with this.&#8221; Then they came around and said, &#8220;Yeah, okay, we see what you&#8217;re doing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><b>WT:<\/b> Can you tell us what the ending that you scrapped was, or that you changed?<\/p>\n<p><b>CR:<\/b> Well, in the original ending, it lined up more with Antigone, so the theorist died in that ending because in a way, it was about putting your life on the line to do something. I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve ever seen this movie <i>Julia <\/i>with Jane Fonda, but in that movie Vanessa Redgrave is the Antigone character, and Jane Fonda is the Ismene character, and they have an ask as well. Vanessa Redgrave&#8217;s character ends up dying during World War II, and she&#8217;s fighting the Nazis. I rewatched that film, and I thought that&#8217;s too easy an out for this conversation, because that&#8217;s not exactly where we are. Where we are, people struggle to contend with a global dynamic that&#8217;s touching everyone as all these countries move to the right, as we are locking down, we are deporting, all of these things. There&#8217;s nowhere you can go where it&#8217;s not touching populations, whether it&#8217;s Morocco or South Africa or all the countries in Europe, and certainly climate change in Asia, and everything, everything is happening at full speed in the United States.<\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Maritza McCauley:<\/b> Speaking of your trilogy, we&#8217;re all huge fans of yours. I just want to pivot a little bit and spend some time talking about craft because you&#8217;re brilliant at craft. I want to talk a bit about crafting a series of brilliant shorter form pieces like those in <i>Citizen <\/i>and <i>Don&#8217;t Let Me Be Lonely<\/i>, that are kind of interconnected versus maintaining a sustained yet still emotionally complex narrative, as you do in <i>Triage<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><b>CR: <\/b>I could not have written <i>Triage<\/i> as a 40-year-old, maybe not even as a 50-year-old. There&#8217;s something about being in the 60s where\u2014there are multiple things. Having had cancer, I\u2019m not feeling like I\u2019m about to die, but once you have cancer, you think, \u201cEverything I do better be the thing I&#8217;m doing, because you just never know,\u201d and so it allowed me to do exactly what I wanted with <i>Triage<\/i>, on the level of craft.<\/p>\n<p>I think all of those years working on a book like <i>Citizen <\/i>that was really interested in the tightening of language to the point where there was no extra; that it just communicated the interaction, and each word counted in a way that, in the longer form it doesn&#8217;t quite work in the same way. <i>Just Us<\/i>\u2014that was also a kind of archival citational exploration that had as its impetus a kind of education around certain issues. <i>Lonely<\/i> was more lyrical, as well, and in all of them, the use of images.<\/p>\n<p>Here in <i>Triage<\/i>, I thought, Look, Claudia, you&#8217;ve written nonfiction. You&#8217;ve written journalistic articles. You write poetry. Why not use what you know from each of these genres to craft this? So I thought, Okay, that will allow me to use the lyric as an internal stethoscope, so that the language of poetry could come in when I wanted to go in, and the reader would have to adjust to the adjustment of language in those moments. Then the more narrative would come out when it came out. The essayistic would be about talking about these art pieces, and all of it will have to live under the same umbrella. Let&#8217;s see if you can do it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><b><i>Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O\u2019Hara. Photograph of Claudia Rankine by Dirk Skiba.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine joins co-hosts Christian Barter, Jennifer Maritza McCauley and Whitney Terrell to talk about her new book Triage.\u00a0 Rankine outlines the decades-long relationship between the book\u2019s narrator and a character she names \u201cthe theorist,\u201d who,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3671,"featured_media":275953,"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":[43069,43112,11,43072,43110,43070],"tags":[30509,110498,301,32311,85181,41410,5089,111584,13543],"class_list":["post-275632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-fiction-non-fiction-lithubradio","category-fullwidth-slider","category-in-conversation","category-lithubradio","category-literary-criticism","tag-antigone","tag-christian-barter","tag-claudia-rankine","tag-fictionnonfiction","tag-jennifer-maritza-mccauley","tag-lit-hub-radio","tag-podcasts","tag-triage","tag-whitney-terrell","story-type-fiction-non-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19HG","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/banner-FNF21.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275632","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\/3671"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275306,"date":"2026-08-19T07:07:30","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:07:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275306"},"modified":"2026-08-19T07:07:30","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:07:30","slug":"range","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/range\/","title":{"rendered":"Range"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dusk fell in the shed, no wind, but the weather clearing. She split some logs, breathed in the scent. Hemp rope, oil, firewood and the clear evening visible through the gap in the south gable wall. The aperture was thin and focused, and through it she could see two woolly figures at the foot of the hill. The neighbour woman with her youngest, most likely, both kitted out in glowing headlamps and swaying softly as they rode at walking pace. Depending on which route they chose, they would be coming through her yard and northward on the old milk run, or they\u2019d keep going straight at the bottom of the hill.<\/p>\n<p>But here they came. They took their sweet time up the hill, and she stood putting logs into the basket as the headlamps danced like orbs above the fallow field in the growing dark. The mother on the bigger Icelandic at the back, the daughter at the front, but no longer small, thought Gunn. All things considered it was as though, in the year Gunn had been observing her, someone had grabbed hold of her at either end and yanked in both directions. She said as much as she went out into the yard to meet them:<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 Look at you, sitting like a grown-up, Jenny, she said, which was disingenuous, because the girl was almost hanging there, and they halted, the horses\u2019 winter coats steaming, mother and daughter, Brit and Jenny, in identical riding helmets with attached lamps.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Happy New Year, Brit said, and they chatted a little about how the holidays had been, and: \u2013 Yes, she\u2019s growing. If she carries on like this it won\u2019t be long before we\u2019re buying her a bigger horse.<\/p>\n<p>The mother laughed, which made the girl slouched sullenly on her Icelandic glance back, and her mother brushed a hand over her face. She did that a lot, and every now and then a blush swept across her cheeks. Always happy, but that hand reaching for the mouth as though to stop what the mouth had already helplessly let slip.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; The weather\u2019s calm, and the sky looks clear again, said Gunn. \u2013 Are you riding far?<\/p>\n<p>They weren\u2019t. In fact they were about to turn and ride back. But they\u2019d seen the lights from the road and the mother had said, why don\u2019t we ride up and see Gunn? So Jenny could ask her herself.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Ask me what?<\/p>\n<p>Gunn set the basket of firewood at her feet.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; She\u2019s got this school project, the mother went on. \u2013 And Jenny really wanted to write about that black thingummy you\u2019ve got hanging in your kitchen, what\u2019s it called, you know, so that\u2019s what we were thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Something buzzed in Gunn\u2019s pocket, a vibration against her thigh: a text. She took a swift glance, but no, it wasn\u2019t from the satellite. It was from the boy, and in a moment it would buzz again.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Which year are you in again? Is it eight or nine? she asked<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Anyway, they\u2019re supposed to come up with a topic by them-selves, said Brit. \u2013 So we were thinking it might be fun, since we\u2019ve got you next door. This one needs something interesting to get her teeth into, since she doesn\u2019t fancy a year at boarding school like all the other kids her age.<\/p>\n<p>Gunn waited for her pocket to buzz again, but no, don\u2019t focus there right now, because the headlamps made mother and daughter look like cyclopses.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Of course, Gunn said. \u2013 What did you have in mind?<\/p>\n<p>It didn\u2019t look like Jenny had anything much in mind, really, or perhaps it was the violent change her body was undergoing. When not dazzled by the lone eye, she could see the strange absence of identity in the girl\u2019s face, and then came the pulse in her pocket again. A small jolt, and Gunn raised her hand, about to place it on the horse\u2019s nose, but she must have moved too quickly; the animal made to rear up. But Jenny had it, no hesitation. No, no affectation there. She acted swiftly, instinctively, a beautiful common-sense reflex, and retained control.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; We can find a day for you to drop by. Does that sound good? she asked.<\/p>\n<p>The girl nodded, and Brit finalised the details for her, coor-dinated and decided that it would be Saturday. Yes, Saturday, after Poul\u2019s go-karting.<\/p>\n<p>Well, that\u2019s how it goes when you\u2019ve got a dad who\u2019s so handy with a screwdriver, eh Jenny? her mother said.<\/p>\n<p>The girl shrugged. Gunn smiled. They took their leave and turned the winter-coated animals in the yard. A brief blinding flash of the headlamps in rotation, and then they moved away in the direction they had come. Swaying shapes, exerting a mutual pull on each other\u2019s mass, a mother and a daughter, and as they passed the bare cherry-plum trees at the bottom of the garden, Gunn called out:<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; I\u2019ll be needing a haircut soon!<\/p>\n<p>And the mother raised a hand and answered:<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Just give me a ring!<\/p>\n<p>Then they continued down the hill toward the postbox, the whitebeam and the crosswise gravel path home. Which was a neatly tended place to the east, a proper family with a different order of gravity. A force such as that could make matter behave in peculiar ways, she knew, and took her phone out of her pocket. Opening the message from the boy, she paused with the firewood at her feet as the lights receded into the darkness:<\/p>\n<p><em>Happy<\/em><em> New Year. All good. 31\u00b0 51<\/em>\u2019 <em>N,<\/em> <em>91\u00b0<\/em> <em>39\u2019<\/em> <em>W<\/em>, he wrote.<\/p>\n<p>He had sent a picture with it. A photo of his hand against a white-painted wooden wall. As though to document the validity of the information. If she got the urge to double-check the data.<\/p>\n<p>It was what they had agreed: she would pay for his road trip, he would send her coordinates and visual documentation, and that was fine. He had to learn to orientate himself. It was part of being an adult, after all; she didn\u2019t want responsibility for him anymore, and in any case it was impossible now. No, he had to learn to resist other people\u2019s ideas, find his own way. Things had become destabilised in the civilisation he had left. But he\u2019d find that out for himself sooner or later. A regular little Sergei Krikalev he was, energetic and gifted, that was for sure, and then she felt a surge of relief that he\u2019d kept their agreement after all, sending the coordinates. The sight of his hand, the slightly crooked little finger. She had known that hand since it had belonged to a child. Dusted with chalk, but there was no mistaking it in the picture: he was a young man now, and a young man must be able to orientate himself. To stand on his own two feet, and she wasn\u2019t going to check the coordinates. There had to be some sort of trust, and she stretched, because it felt good to stand like that. Up on her tiptoes, rising. Darkness settling now across the area. There were the sudden stars. Another centimetre more and she could touch them with her fingertips.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>But she couldn\u2019t just leave it, could she, the coordinates. No, she would solve his riddle that evening. Go slowly now, Gunn, she said to herself, bending over the basket of firewood. You can\u2019t rush insight. It needs a systematic approach, ideally with a strong hypothesis. It\u2019s about data. Data points are not thoughts in a stream to be stopped. They exist and can be read and understood once they are discovered, set down, documented and computed. Data to the decimal, yes, and there may not be enough of it to draw conclusions, but what data points have been established are factual and viable stepping stones to new knowledge. We must be bookkeepers: data can only be reliably interpreted if one doesn\u2019t get carried away, and there was the handle of the bucket in her hand. There was one foot after another, through the kitchen and across to the stove. Put the bucket down, the kettle on. Socks, back to the living room, newspaper and briquettes. Pause until the fire is lit, and the kettle in the kitchen has long since clicked off. No rush, make the instant coffee and stir it less bitter with milk.<\/p>\n<p>Only then did she sit down and write in her notebook:<\/p>\n<p><em>Sunday.<\/em> <em>New<\/em> <em>Year\u2019s<\/em> <em>greeting<\/em> <em>came<\/em> <em>in<\/em> <em>16.21,<\/em> <em>photographic<\/em><em> documentation. <\/em><em>He<\/em> <em>also<\/em><em> sent coordinates. Southern USA, estimated.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Patience. That was the basis of all research. That and curiosity, hard work and the ability to cope with disappointment, or at least to keep researching off the back of it. She had taught him that. The best thing that could happen to you was a paradox, a concatenation of discoveries, friction and collapsed assumptions: all new knowledge gives you the right to think, and a willingness to fail points you forward.<\/p>\n<p>She had taught him that.<\/p>\n<p>She lit a candle and fell back into her own thoughts, listening to the soft pursuits of night around the house. The fox perhaps, a deer or the rustle of the stone marten. Like electricity, it sounded, and somewhere to the northeast far away she could see a single tractor trundling back into the shed with a bucket full of feed. Out to the silage, home to the cows and the potatoes: Sava, Bintje, Folva, Estima. Boil them up just right, although Bintje was very mealy boiled, as she recalled. Sava, on the other hand, took boiling well. Gravy draped across it smooth as a quilt, and now she was hungry. There were maybe-maybe not potatoes in the pantry, and she glanced over at the door. On it was the poster of the black thingummy that had piqued Jenny\u2019s interest.<\/p>\n<p>Or was it Brit?<\/p>\n<p>Yes, more likely Brit.<\/p>\n<p>Which puzzled Gunn, because she couldn\u2019t remember Brit ever asking her about work in all the time they\u2019d been neighbours. Not when she cut her hair, or when they ran into each other in the system. Sometimes they\u2019d drink coffee in the kitchen: no questions, just chatter about food and potted plants, and Gunn preferred to talk about the potted plants.<\/p>\n<p>The biggest problem, when you don\u2019t know anything, is asking the first question. Gunn knew that, and she also knew that was the blessing. But yes, it\u2019s best to have something solid to seize hold of before you grope your way forwards. The end of a rope, fragments of a language at least, but no matter how much I alter mine, I still sound strange to Brit\u2019s ears, thought Gunn. And I make her nervous. She might come across as uneducated, that\u2019s why. Which she is, and yet I\u2019m the one disrupting our shared understanding of reality.<\/p>\n<p>But at least Brit was a good mother. Or so Gunn assumed, and a good mother is not to be scoffed at, even if good motherhood was sometimes tricky to deal with. Certain practical and loving people viewed abstractions as attempts to escape, and thus a way of failing at what was essential in life. Highly educated, sure, but what did Gunn know <em>really<\/em>? The <em>really <\/em>could not be measured and calculated mathematically. Instead you were supposed to make an effort with what was in front of you. Present yourself as the natural centre of a given family. Stuff your knowledge of placentas and sour nursing pads down strangers\u2019 throats. It was natural, sacred almost, and preordained.<\/p>\n<p>Spectroscopic surveys, on the other hand? No thank you, not while we\u2019re eating.<\/p>\n<p>And yet. On the pantry door hung an old poster of the dark hub at the centre of Messier 87. Millions of light-years away, but because of that black thing Brit had come riding up the hill at dusk. She had brought her daughter as a pretext. Other people\u2019s children, thought Gunn, as she got to her feet and rummaged vainly for potatoes in the bucket behind the door. She found only a few wrinkled, inedible tubers already sprouting, and wrote \u2018potatoes\u2019 on a shopping list next to the spice shelf.<\/p>\n<p>She boiled her spaghetti, ate it, with the black thing luminous just a few feet from the kitchen sink. Held up with tape at the corners in what the locals called Magna\u2019s house, and which was now Gunn\u2019s, although nobody really understood why.<\/p>\n<p><em>It\u2019s to do with the sky<\/em>, she had informed the local paper when she moved in, but that didn\u2019t change the fact that nobody really understood why.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>Not until that evening did she type in the coordinates from the boy\u2019s message, and it was as expected, although she\u2019d never heard of the place before: Sicily Island, Louisiana. A one-horse town not far from the Mississippi River on its heaviest route south. A church, a high school, a supermarket. Not a single touristy photograph to be found on the web. The place had an opioid-ridden, dying look, and if he\u2019d sent a similar picture to his parents they\u2019d be standing in their open-plan kitchen right now gazing anxiously at each other. They would adjust the light above the kitchen island with that dimmer switch his father had installed, and they would agree to direct their anger towards Gunn. That was for sure. But he was getting on all right, the boy. She knew that, and there was no reason to lose sleep over what he was doing in that hole, and what would happen when he came home. If he did come home, and she typed.<\/p>\n<p><em>Happy New Year. All good here. Static coordinates. Like you I\u2019m in the <\/em><em>back of<\/em> <em>beyond, I see. Remember to look up.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Should she send a picture as well?<\/p>\n<p>No, no picture, and then she hit send. He wouldn\u2019t reply, and she wouldn\u2019t lose sleep over it. It wasn\u2019t her responsibility, and still she lay sleepless when she went to bed.<\/p>\n<p>It was partly the coordinates, partly the foot Brit had stuck in the door, and on top of that the gamma-ray bursts. She had taken these shifts so that her colleagues could enjoy the holiday with their families. Now the phone was on her pillow, in case there was a burst in the middle of the night. Anything that would be able to wake her if she dozed off was switched on, turned up. Above her, on the other side of the skylight she\u2019d had put in, was a stretch of night sky. Over in the wide south-facing dormer window was the reflecting telescope. They\u2019d been about to chuck it when they cleared out the teaching lab. But how big and beautiful it was. Pillar-box red and specially designed, and beyond it she could make out the lowermost stars in the Winter Hexagon. Betelgeuse and the Pleiades hung\u2014one billowing, one trembling\u2014out of sight somewhere past the window frame. Most of this had to be imagined from the bed, without the telescope, but she couldn\u2019t be bothered to get up, and there was Rigel, if she felt like it, but she didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>She thought of Sicily Island, Louisiana, and of course that couldn\u2019t be seen even with the telescope. His hand against the white clapboard building, and how deeply she hoped he was activating his ability to orientate himself. In the meantime she was waiting for the next data set. From his trip, from the satellite, from the telescope, from Niels, from various students, from colleagues and from the deep universe. Yes, waiting for news with a faint heaviness in the body. It came and went and settled at the bottom of her, and she couldn\u2019t sleep. Every time she tried to sink herself into sleep, she bobbed back up into consciousness again. Like a wobble-bottomed toy. Kept upright by all the things that might reach out and meddle: the will and ill-will of other people, their children and projects. And the gamma-ray bursts, and they were important. The smartphone against her thigh in her pocket by day. Close to her ear on the pillow by night. So that the satellite could get hold of her when the bursts came. That was how they did it, Merry Christmas. And no, she couldn\u2019t sleep now, and so she looked up:<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>It was the same night sky she and everybody else had grown up underneath, with no notion of what exorbitant depths it contained. When she was a child, it was a black dome placed over the world each night, but behind that darkness was a light. Somebody had taken a cosmic needle and poked holes in the dome so that the light could filter in. These pinpricks constituted the stars, and when you\u2019re little you\u2019re allowed to imagine anything. It is an unheard-of privilege, and she had watched the Moon from the back seat of her father\u2019s car. The way it always stayed still as he drove. It might disappear behind the trees, might be swallowed by the lighting in the streets, but the car kept driving on, and before long the Moon would pop up again. And again. Exactly where it was supposed to: waning, waxing, but constant, and now there she hung, just like the Moon, observing the expanse where she was trying to fall asleep.<\/p>\n<p>It lay huge and dark, deep in the body of the landscape. At the periphery, the big cities with their golden nightlights bound together by long threads of motorway. Colonies of light, throngs of people, but there in the rural dark: an area whose infrastructure crumbled year on year. The geography was only for those in the know. Difficult to set out into, and at regular intervals people got disorientated and drove up gravel paths to places that no longer existed, or where the original track cut off. Long roads to dead ends, points where nobody passed through and which were suitable for hiding.<\/p>\n<p>This is private property, the road ends here, and then the game cameras, the shooting stands, and she had found dilapidated camper vans abandoned in the depths. Small cabins with exotic names, but that far in the only visitors were accidental.<\/p>\n<p>Orientating oneself meant knowledge of the road names and the ability to distinguish between a road where there were people living and a tractor trail. What looked like a through road on the map would often have transformed in the interim into a field. GPS didn\u2019t work, coverage was patchy, and when it got so dark that if you were looking down from a satellite, as Gunn now drowsily imagined, the whole area would seem like some kind of crater.<\/p>\n<p>But looking up from this dark hole, the night sky was a paradise of signs. Yes, seen from down in the crater, the sky was a piece of living archaeology, and the longer Gunn could spend gazing out at it, the better her grasp of the root of time. Burst by burst, flock of rooks by flock of rooks, and here I hang, she thought, tidally locked for the night, with my face turned to the earth like the Moon itself. I am somewhere in between them, hanging from a sewing thread, ready to fall or to rise.<\/p>\n<p>What do I know?<\/p>\n<p>What do I know that I don\u2019t know? What would I like to know?<\/p>\n<p>She repeated these questions so long that towards morning she was able to sink into a flickering sleep. Heart active as a baby bird\u2019s. Ear turned towards the gamma-ray bursts from the pillow. Trying to crawl her way towards a spot between her shoulder blades. Scratch, scratch back, and no storm passed across the land. There was quiet and a new moon, black as soot outside, and far above the Earth, Betelgeuse was burning.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\">__________________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>From <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781644454046\">Range<\/a> <em>by Dorthe Nors.\u00a0Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Dorthe Nors. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, <span draggable=\"true\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.graywolfpress.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">www.graywolfpress.org<\/a><\/span>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dusk fell in the shed, no wind, but the weather clearing. She split some logs, breathed in the scent. Hemp rope, oil, firewood and the clear evening visible through the gap in the south gable wall. The aperture was thin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":275307,"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":[99004,15528,937,45195],"class_list":["post-275306","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-caroline-waight","tag-dorthe-nors","tag-graywolf-press","tag-range","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5rKFr-range","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/9781644454046.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275306","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=275306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275428,"date":"2026-08-19T06:53:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275428"},"modified":"2026-08-25T08:48:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T12:48:19","slug":"how-ursula-k-le-guin-channeled-her-environmentalism-into-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-ursula-k-le-guin-channeled-her-environmentalism-into-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"How Ursula K. Le Guin Channeled Her Environmentalism Into Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1960s and 1970s, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote speculative fiction shaped by her interests in environments and ecologies, her pacifist anarchist feminism, and her anti-Vietnam War activism. <i>A Wizard of Earthsea<\/i> (1968), one of the great fantasy novels and still a widely read classic of young adult literature that helped define the category, is about a young wizard coming of age, learning to control his powers, and trying to understand all his relations, including plants, animals, the earth, and other people.<\/p>\n<p>Just a year later came the great thought experiment <i>The Left Hand of Darkness<\/i> (1969) about the Gethenians\u2019 unique sexual physiology, which involves a sexually active period called kemmer, the only time they are not androgynous and sexually inactive. Then, they can become either male or female, depending on the situation. Le Guin always insisted the environment was just as important as gender and sexuality in the novel. An investigator from another, peaceful world reports that \u201cthe dominant factor in Gethenian life is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world.\u201d She adds, \u201cI really don\u2019t see how anyone could put much stock in victory or glory after he had spent a winter on Winter, and seen the face of the Ice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">Climate change visions of transformed Oregon and California places and spaces show up in the worlds Le Guin imagines.<\/p>\n<p>Furious about U.S. violence in Vietnam, Le Guin wrote <i>The Word for World is Forest<\/i> (1972), a source for James Cameron\u2019s blockbuster film <i>Avatar<\/i> (2009), but with no white man saviors with whom to identify. Instead, colonists from Earth cut down trees that comprise the natives\u2019 world, rape native women, and extract labor from native men, until they successfully revolt. Later, Le Guin wrote <i>The Dispossessed<\/i> (1974), another classic exploring pacifist anarchist ideas through two worlds with very different environments and relations to state power and capitalism. This brief list does not begin to exhaust Le Guin\u2019s many influential novels, short stories, poems, translations, children\u2019s books, essays, talks, and other kinds of writing connecting environments and ecologies to gender, race, and sexuality; criticizing state violence and techno-fix thinking; and imagining other societies and worlds. <i>Always Coming Home<\/i> (1985), a speculative fiction rooted in Northern California lands where she grew up, is perhaps Le Guin\u2019s most ambitious novel.<\/p>\n<p>Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, attended Berkeley High School, and spent summers in California\u2019s Napa Valley, where her family was sometimes visited by her father\u2019s Native friends and collaborators. Le Guin\u2019s father, Alfred Kroeber, founded the UC Berkeley anthropology department while her mother, Theodora, authored the University of California Press bestseller <i>Ishi in Two Worlds<\/i> (1961) and other books. Le Guin graduated from Radcliffe, then earned a master\u2019s degree in Renaissance French and Italian literature from Columbia in 1952 before receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Paris. On the way there, she met her husband-to-be, Charles, whom she married in Paris. After they returned to the United States and moved to Portland, Le Guin left academia to raise their children in their northwest hills home down the street from Forest Park, where she lived for the rest of her life.<\/p>\n<p>In the archive, the significance of California and Oregon places, spaces, and the more-than-human world comes through powerfully in syllabi, class notes, drawings, and documents Le Guin created and collected from workshops she helped organize in Portland, on the Oregon Coast, on the McKenzie River, at the Malheur Field Station, and at Humboldt State in Arcata, California. Le Guin wrote that \u201cthe great, improbable impetus\u201d to <i>The Tombs of Atuan<\/i> (1970) was \u201cour first visit to Harney County, a high and lonesome land of mountains and great sagebrush plains, of pure skies, far distances, and silence&#8230;I knew my novel would be set in that desert&#8230;I began to dream my story. The land had given it to me.\u201d Climate change visions of transformed Oregon and California places and spaces show up in the worlds Le Guin imagines in <i>The Lathe of Heaven<\/i> (1971), <i>The New Atlantis<\/i> (1975), and <i>Always Coming Home<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">Le Guin told the reporter that she could do without people a lot better than she could do without animals, plants, and rocks.<\/p>\n<p>When Mount St. Helens erupted in May 1980, Le Guin watched it all day long from her bedroom while listening to a country and western radio station, only turning on the television later that night. Soon thereafter, she conducted a research project in which she invited people to send her their dreams about the eruption, then delivered a lecture at the Portland Jung Institute in which she read excerpts from forty-nine dreams while providing \u201csome random commentary.\u201d Le Guin placed ads in <em>Willamette Week<\/em> and the PSU student newspaper, the <em>Vanguard<\/em>, stating she was collecting dreams about Mount St. Helens for an Oregon Friends of Jung meeting talk and perhaps a magazine article. In a 1980 issue of <em>Parabola<\/em> magazine, Le Guin published an essay entitled \u201cA Very Warm Mountain,\u201d which she reprinted in a chapbook called <i>The Red Zone<\/i> (1983) that she and her artist friend Henk Pander created after visiting the blast area sixteen months later. Le Guin\u2019s prose and poetry mourn the dead forest and other living Earth beings while exulting at the mountain\u2019s power.<\/p>\n<span class=\"caption\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275429\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-ursula-k-le-guin-channeled-her-environmentalism-into-fiction\/figure-intro-2-copy\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Figure-Intro.2-copy-scaled.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"2560,2144\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Figure Intro.2 copy\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Figure-Intro.2-copy-1223x1024.jpg\" class=\"wp-image-275429 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Figure-Intro.2-copy-1223x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1223\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Figure-Intro.2-copy-1223x1024.jpg 1223w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Figure-Intro.2-copy-300x251.jpg 300w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Figure-Intro.2-copy-768x643.jpg 768w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Figure-Intro.2-copy-60x50.jpg 60w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Figure-Intro.2-copy-1536x1287.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Figure-Intro.2-copy-2048x1715.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Figure-Intro.2-copy-50x42.jpg 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1223px) 100vw, 1223px\" \/> Le Guin in front of Mount St. Helens in 1984 Life. Credit: Fred Swanson.<\/span>\n<p>In a photograph of Le Guin published in 1984, when she was fifty-five, she smiles at the camera while resting her arms on a large rock in front of Mount St. Helens. Le Guin claims that science fiction is like landscape painting because it gives you a world. She thinks of the volcano as a kind of companion. The article emphasizes that Le Guin\u2019s books are preoccupied with nature. Le Guin told the reporter that she could do without people a lot better than she could do without animals, plants, and rocks.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">___________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275430\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-ursula-k-le-guin-channeled-her-environmentalism-into-fiction\/science-fiction-ecologies\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/science-fiction-ecologies.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"596,894\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"science fiction ecologies\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/science-fiction-ecologies.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275430\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/science-fiction-ecologies-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/science-fiction-ecologies-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/science-fiction-ecologies-40x60.jpg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/science-fiction-ecologies-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/science-fiction-ecologies.jpg 596w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>From<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781479833429\">Science Fiction Ecologies: Worldmaking with Butler, Le Guin, and Merril<\/a> <em>by Shelley Streeby. Copyright (c) 2026. Available from NYU Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1960s and 1970s, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote speculative fiction shaped by her interests in environments and ecologies, her pacifist anarchist feminism, and her anti-Vietnam War activism. A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), one of the great fantasy novels<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31567,"featured_media":275933,"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":[43108,43069,11,43070,43231],"tags":[30826,593,111688,111689,7026,4165],"class_list":["post-275428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-craftandcriticism","category-fullwidth-slider","category-literary-criticism","category-nature","tag-nyu-press","tag-science-fiction","tag-science-fiction-ecologies-worldmaking-with-butler-le-guin-and-merril","tag-shelley-streeby","tag-the-environment","tag-ursula-k-le-guin","story-type-science-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Eo","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ursula-le-guin.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275428","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\/31567"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275871,"date":"2026-08-19T06:45:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275871"},"modified":"2026-08-19T07:03:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:03:29","slug":"how-accusations-against-black-academics-point-to-the-real-end-of-woke-1-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-accusations-against-black-academics-point-to-the-real-end-of-woke-1-0\/","title":{"rendered":"How Accusations Against Black Academics Point to the Real End of \u201cWoke 1.0\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This week, the British academy was rocked by a scandal that curdled into a tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jason Arday, a neurodivergent Black Cambridge professor who was feted as a wunderkind by some and denigrated as a fabulist by others, resigned earlier this month amidst accusations of plagiarism.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">After experiencing several weeks of hounding by the British press\u2014including dog-whistly suggestions that he was a DEI hire, under-qualified from the start\u2014Arday was found dead at his home last Friday of apparent suicide. He was 41 years old.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2026\/aug\/17\/the-guardian-view-on-jason-arday-a-tragedy-that-demands-reflection\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">an editorial<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> published today explaining their role in the investigation, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Guardian<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> positioned the professor&#8217;s death as an alarming bellwether. Whatever his intellectual indiscretions, editors wrote, Arday, the youngest Black professor in Cambridge&#8217;s 800 year history, &#8220;became an exhibit in an ideological, almost Trumpian campaign against diversity and inclusion.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In his death, the editors insisted, we must locate a lesson. But of what, exactly?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And who is &#8216;we?&#8217;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">*<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Arday&#8217;s case became the subject of international fascination in part because it rhymes with a conversation happening on this side of the Atlantic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For the past year, the Trump administration and its too-ready-to-comply henchmen in higher-ed have been hard at work<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-black-studies-departments-are-being-dismantled-at-american-colleges\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">dismantling Black and Africana Studies programs<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> on charges of &#8220;woke ideology.&#8221; (Northwestern University&#8217;s program is the latest on the<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/quick-takes\/2026\/08\/18\/northwesterns-african-studies-program-loses-research-status\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">chopping block<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, as of this week.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The scapegoating is singular, but convenient in the same way. Where <a href=\"https:\/\/coreyrobin.com\/2026\/08\/10\/on-plagiarism\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">English racists<\/a> cry DEI hire, American ones cry DEI <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">curriculum<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. All with the same net effect: diminishing the work of Black and POC scholars. <\/span>And alas, the baddies are winning. Big time. Even the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/2026\/09\/elite-academia-leadership-hypocrisy\/687969\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">liberal backlash against DEI<\/a> programs begins to take on the rhetoric and tone of its initial conservative haters.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In fact, it&#8217;s a no good, very bad time for <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">all<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the FKA woke folk. Though it&#8217;s sometimes been hard to hear this bell over the death knell for American<\/span> <a href=\"https:\/\/hechingerreport.org\/more-than-a-quarter-of-private-colleges-are-at-risk-of-closing-new-projection-shows\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">college,<\/span><\/a> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">in general.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All across the States, university enrollment is down while tuitions are soaring. Meanwhile, degraded working conditions\u2014see, the<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/login\/?return_to=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenation.com%2Farticle%2Fsociety%2Fadjuncting-until-the-end-of-time%2F\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">adjunctification<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> discourse\u2014make academic professionalization less and less sustainable. This financial reckoning neatly coincides with the ongoing ideological assault. And the bottom line bodes ill for all current seniors.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As Joel A. Schlosser and Tommaso Bardelli wrote in a recent analysis for the<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/microcollege-movement-liberal-arts-deep-springs-sheldon-jackson\/\"> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Los Angeles Review of Books<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, college skepticism in the States is no longer a particularly partisan issue.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;Whether driven by rising tuition costs and student debt or ideological polarization on campus,&#8221; Bardelli and Schlosser observed, &#8220;a growing number of both Democratic and Republican voters have become less certain of the value of a four-year college education.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All this makes for tough ground to defend, and a climate that&#8217;s all too hospitable to reactionary explanation. It&#8217;s easy to imagine the institution\u2019s defense.<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> When kids can\u2019t afford the sticker price full-stop, how do we make the case for something like Black Studies? Always a precarious field, in a racist country?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And if you follow <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">that<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> aggrieved line of thought, and accept the terms of debate set by the powers-that-be, how could you possibly forgive a person who appears to<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> cheat <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">at the rigged game?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Goat, meet scape.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">*<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Guardian<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is right to perceive Arday in context. In July this side of the Atlantic, another Blackademic<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/07\/10\/books\/kerri-greenidge-the-grimkes.html\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">came under fire<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> amidst plagiarism accusations.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The historian Kerri Greenidge lost her job at Tufts University and had a book contract canceled after a peer review found several misattributions in her 2022 book, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Greenidge, an award-winning public historian, refuted all charges, and told the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">New York Times<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that attacks on her scholarship were racially motivated. As in Arday&#8217;s case, online debate about the scholar&#8217;s alleged crimes quickly became unhinged before key details could be verified.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Presidential historian<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Alexis Coe argued in <a href=\"https:\/\/alexiscoe.substack.com\/p\/the-scandal-and-the-scale?utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=web&amp;triedRedirect=truehttps:\/\/alexiscoe.substack.com\/p\/the-scandal-and-the-scale?utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=web&amp;triedRedirect=true\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a recent newsletter<\/a> that it&#8217;s significant this shaky story was made public at all. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In her own defense, Greenidge pointed out that prominent white historians have been granted far more interpretive latitude than she received. And though this context does not prove racial discrimination was at work in her case, Coe argues \u201cit does make race and power legitimate subjects of inquiry rather than rude interruptions of a supposedly neutral process.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Coe also points out that the nature of Greenidge&#8217;s scholarship is relevant to the \u201csupposedly neutral\u201d process of her public shaming.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Grimkes, <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Greenidge explores &#8220;<\/span>how slavery\u2019s violence continued inside a family celebrated for transcending it.&#8221; Her take on the famous sisters &#8220;demonstrated how white feminist history manufactures usable ancestors&#8221; while considering &#8220;who must disappear to make them usable.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Like Coe, I&#8217;m of the opinion that readers deserve to see receipts for any project aspiring to history. But the target, the substance, and the timing here are hard to ignore.<\/p>\n<p>Though the jury&#8217;s still out on her case, you get the sense that someone&#8217;s won, when all accusations bend away from substance and back toward scandal. And it wasn&#8217;t the scholar, in this case.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">*<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Guardian<\/span><\/em><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> editors were more frank about the role racism played in Arday&#8217;s downfall. Though some accusations seem to hold water, the headline is his hounding in context. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;White academics are generally allowed to fail as individuals,&#8221; editors wrote.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Black ones are not. Arday may have had questions to answer; that did not make black academics collectively answerable for him. A society committed to equality must allow black people the same freedom as everyone else: to be<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/garyyounge\/status\/2088359527657730223?s=20\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">flawed<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, to make mistakes, and even to fail, without their failure becoming an indictment of their race.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Blackademic read this defense with a huge sigh. Because the words are so worn, so <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">obvious<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, it feels like they could have been written fifty years ago. Which is precisely the trouble with accepting debate terms established by the racist country or institution in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you\u2019re a Black scholar caught cheating the (rigged) system, somehow, you wind up having to defend your entire <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">humanity<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Instead of apologizing for a mistake.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">*<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Plagiarism is an interesting charge for the unique moral taint it carries. As we see in cases like Arday&#8217;s or Greenidge&#8217;s, the very accusation often confers guilt. Burden of proof is reversed: you must prove yourself innocent to the peer review, the public opinion. Meanwhile, the charge of intellectual theft has often landed on the least powerful. And as Coe implies, that&#8217;s rarely a coincidence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In <a href=\"https:\/\/coreyrobin.com\/2026\/08\/10\/on-plagiarism\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a recent newsletter<\/a>, the political theorist Corey Robin considered how the charge of plagiarism has been weaponized against what some of us never stopped calling &#8220;DEI hires.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;There are cases of plagiarism where people don\u2019t bat an eye or the person gets exonerated (the ones I am thinking of involve white men) and others where people, often of color, are brought down,&#8221; Robin noted.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Like Coe, he is able to hold two ideas in head when it comes to untangling crime and context.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I am not\u2014I repeat, I am not\u2014saying that plagiarism is different if it\u2019s committed by a scholar of color or a white scholar; it\u2019s not, and it should be handled as the serious breach that it is. But I do think the cultural valence that gets provoked, disrupted, imbalanced, what have you, is different for scholars of color<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8230;plagiarism scandals provoke a similar crisis and discourse of authenticity in the context of scholars of color\u2014the idea being, essentially, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">you don\u2019t belong here in academia.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And this, I fear, is the &#8220;lesson&#8221; too many will take from these unsettling stories, in this oh-so-unsettled time. Arday and Greenidge are distinct cases, distinct human beings. Who have also (and so easily!) been made into symbols. Ideological exhibits. Proof, for either side of a bad faith debate, that the invitation to the Ivory Tower is contingent for most of us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We will talk about the ways they did or did not play crooked far longer than we\u2019ll talk about the way the game stays rigged.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, the British academy was rocked by a scandal that curdled into a tragedy. Jason Arday, a neurodivergent Black Cambridge professor who was feted as a wunderkind by some and denigrated as a fabulist by others, resigned earlier this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17066,"featured_media":275934,"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":[43102,6,43101,43092,43095],"tags":[10985,111835,35675,109224,7383,6105,37872,101522,60646,576,109227,111833,111845,1058,10264,111836,31017,111834],"class_list":["post-275871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biography","category-features","category-history","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-academia","tag-adjunct","tag-alexis-coe","tag-black-studies","tag-cambridge","tag-college","tag-corey-robin","tag-dei","tag-higher-ed","tag-history","tag-ivy-league","tag-jason-arday","tag-kerri-greenidge","tag-plagiarism","tag-scandal","tag-the-grimkes","tag-university","tag-woke-ideology"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Lx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jason-Arday.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275871","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=275871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275843,"date":"2026-08-19T06:41:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:41:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275843"},"modified":"2026-08-19T07:00:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:00:25","slug":"the-submitters-on-the-literary-economy-of-unreadness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-submitters-on-the-literary-economy-of-unreadness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Submitters: On the Literary Economy of Unreadness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the true beginner, there can be no end. From the moment they sit at the desk, the unemerged writer faces a step-by-step gauntlet of workshopping, applying, contesting; of liking screenshots of <em>Publishers Weekly<\/em> deals announcements, making astral connections between time periods, and writing sex scenes from a distant gender\u2019s point of view; it is a culture of fees, of Moleskines, and bios that read seriously, seriously, jokingly; of tips, tools, and works in progress in, one can only assume, sheds; of deadlines for floodgate submission periods and inboxes full of <em>L<\/em>\u2019s; of checks for $50 like birthday gifts from doting grandmothers (though no one calls to remind you to cash them); of sending out short fiction like so many state-fair-quality butternut squashes and banging out <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/jia-tolentino\/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over\">personal essays a decade after boom\u2019s end<\/a>. All that, and what to show for it, and what to tell?<\/p>\n<p>Among those ostensible first steps in the writing trade is to simultaneously storm the gates of literary agents, the subject of Laura McGrath\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/middlemen-literary-agents-and-the-making-of-american-fiction-laura-b-mcgrath\/df5cb73be04facb1\/?aid=132!\"><em>Middlemen<\/em><\/a>. It follows Dan Sinykin\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/big-fiction-how-conglomeration-changed-the-publishing-industry-and-american-literature-dan-sinykin\/e3e2be9daf78903e\/?aid=132!\"><em>Big Fiction<\/em><\/a>\u2014a history of the publishing conglomerate\u2014and elaborates on Mark McGurl\u2019s deathless <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/program-era-postwar-fiction-and-the-rise-of-creative-writing-associate-professor-mark-mcgurl\/a021f0e9c2c0b7f7\/?aid=132!\"><em>Program Era<\/em><\/a> (or, what little of \u201cMFA discourse\u201d makes actual reference to it) in describing clearly but with the occasional interesting verb our current literary economy. McGrath sees agents as a missing link, traders of \u201csymbolic capital,\u201d a split difference between market manipulators and keepers of the flame of tastefulness in an algorithmic world. Incidentally, <em>Middlemen<\/em> also makes a near pass, ever so close to an observation of the dark matter of books. The vast majority of contemporary literature is not in fact published but <em>submitted<\/em>. If, as Christian Lorenzen wrote, \u201cthe dominant literary style in America is careerism,\u201d then it\u2019s the writers without careers who are most responsible.<\/p>\n<p>We have only approximate measure of the slush. In <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/everything-and-less-the-novel-in-the-age-of-amazon-mark-mcgurl\/56d055ce82bf8dd8\/?aid=132!\"><em>Everything and Less<\/em><\/a>, his book on Amazon, McGurl faintly detects an \u201cunderlist, a vast ocean of inert literary content stored on the server at marginal cost.\u201d This anti-canon may or may not include samples attached to an estimated <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/mfa-by-the-numbers-on-the-eve-of-awp\/#:~:text=Number%20of%20MFA%20programs%20in,3%2C000\">20,000 annual applications to MFAs<\/a>, with acceptance rates plummeting below 2%\u2014nearly as discriminating as a no-name literary journal or a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/02\/23\/technology\/clarkesworld-submissions-ai-sci-fi.html\">deluged sci-fi magazine<\/a>. Add to that McGrath\u2019s conservative estimate of <a href=\"https:\/\/laurabmcgrath.substack.com\/p\/textcrunch-no-2-looking-inside-the?r=k17e&amp;utm_medium=ios&amp;triedRedirect=true\">15-17 million <\/a>full manuscripts in the slush piles of literary agencies, plus the 1.4 million new titles per year earning royalties via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). What is significant about these marginally publishable literary acts, these <em>ten pages in the body<\/em> (of the email), is not how they are read but their conspicuous unreadness. Merely implied in the familiar story of technological advance\u2014the speed and volume and \u201coverload\u201d of information\u2014is the correspondingly exponential increase in futility. Go forth and \u201cfind your voice,\u201d the Submitters were told. And so it was a million times found, and then promptly lost.<\/p>\n<p>In publishing, this futility is something of an open secret. Penguin Random House, largest seller of books, and most eager to sell them best, testified in court that the sales of only <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/08\/19\/books\/prh-penguin-random-house-trial.html\">4 percent<\/a> of its books effectively subsidized the rest. \u201cEverything is random in publishing,\u201d said CEO Markus Dohle, to serve his argument that a merger with Simon &amp; Schuster would hardly create a monopoly in, among other things, bookselling acumen. But the numbers back him up. According to BookScan, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/08\/19\/books\/prh-penguin-random-house-trial.html\">of the 3.2 million new titles of 2021<\/a>, fewer than 1 percent sold more than 5,000 copies. This reality jars somewhat against the narrative of a P&amp;L-fixated \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/life-inside-the-fiction-factory-dan-sinykin-on-conglomerate-publishing\/\">superorganism<\/a>\u201d that marshals its editors and marketers in the production of data-driven page-turners, a supposedly well-oiled machine built to dominate the bestseller list.<\/p>\n<p>A glance at that list tells a different story. Big-5 publishing has routinely dipped into the underlist for romantasy, fanfic, and film-adaptable sci-fi on personal websites\u2014books already technically published, with proven sales or downloads or likes on forums or communities or platforms that haphazardly systematize iterative plays on genre. (Ruby Dixon\u2019s self-pubbed Ice Planet Barbarians series\u2019 big blue sex aliens with <em>knots<\/em> are followed up by <em>Bull Moon Rising<\/em>\u2019s sex minotaurs\u2019 <em>ruts <\/em>from Ace, 2025, but both, for instance, have horns). On any given week,<a href=\"#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a> half the <em>NYT<\/em> trade and hardcover fiction lists might emerge from this end-around traditional publishing, forcing agents and editors to pivot into the role of recruiters. This is publishing\u2019s adaptation of the gimmickry of modern culture industries: the ability to set aside the success of one\u2019s own product and still make on-time deliveries of shareholder profit. It should go without saying that if publishers were leveraging proprietary knowledge of what books their customers want to read, readers would be reading them. Two things can be true: that the business has been remorselessly optimized for sales, and the sellers are coming from outside the house.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">Exclusion generates the prestige toward which unpaid labors strive.<\/p>\n<p>Once upon a time, the Crichtons and the Grishams ruled a mass market for books, and the literary novel thrived in its wake\u2014\u201chigh-cultural pluralism\u201d (McGurl\u2019s beautifully circumspect genre distinction) or \u201cbooks about race\u201d (McGrath\u2019s blunt assessment of the market for it); Knausg\u00e5rd, Cusk, and the unlikely household names of autofiction; the McCarthy western among fuzzy \u201cgenre hybrids\u201d \u2014a definition which <em>Middlemen<\/em> insightfully elides in proposing the lit agent\u2019s capricious taste as the precise locus of art and commerce (i.e. the \u201ccultural dislocation\u201d of super-agent Nicole Aragi\u2019s list). But the most influential literary genre is the one that clearly doesn\u2019t exist. \u201cMFA fiction\u201d\u2014ordered with extra solipsism by the CIA\u2014has made for eloquent and blistering pans, but serves primarily as a voodoo doll of the Iowa Writer\u2019s Workshop.<a href=\"#_ftn2\" name=\"_ftnref2\">[2]<\/a> Textbook examples of MFA style (\u201cWas it the woman in the lace-top thigh-highs, chemise wrap, or the Taylor strapless bra\u201d\u2014a character browsing the Victoria\u2019s Secret catalogue in Grover\u2019s piece from Noah Baumbach\u2019s <em>Kicking &amp; Screaming<\/em>) are vague enough to read as projections of anxiety about literature\u2019s unstreamable irrelevance, which academics and rank-and-file Submitters would prefer to attribute to guys in your MFA and publishers\u2019 aping of algorithmic data-ism, rather than face a <em>Road<\/em>esque apocalyptic landscape where publishers can\u2019t sell books, and literary agents gatekeep a mainstream that doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n<p>What is listed in the last remaining book sections and shelved in the last remaining bookstores play their diminishing parts, but a structural theory of books culture is incomplete without accounting for the profound outnumbering of traditional publishing\u2019s successes by the pages upon pages of the Submitters\u2019 foiled ambitions: futility at scale. The compelling factor of the MFA era and conglomeration is not top-down mechanization\u2014in any case an overstatement of corporate competence\u2014but the bottom-up professionalization of writing that tried to meet it halfway, and <em>necessarily<\/em> failed to meet it there. Exclusion generates the prestige toward which unpaid labors strive.<\/p>\n<p>Sinykin argues that the contemporary author is themself a fiction, an industrial composite; and so is the failed author, who attempts to navigate a system that\u2019s not supposed to work so much as protract the emergent, extractive process for the aspirer and facilitate their art\u2019s contribution to its own obsolescence. The plight of the Submitter tracks with the paradox of the internet age: those same democratizing elements\u2014more MFA programs, more literary prizes, the publishing industry\u2019s belated commitments to diversity, reckless access to social media platforms where writers do freelance publicity for themselves \u2014lengthen the odds of the lottery by increasing the overall number of ticketholders, and tend to strengthen the hand of elite institutions. If college students are indeed struggling to read beyond the short excerpts of test prep, it seems plausible that books culture as we knew it could never reemerge. The age of the Submitters is here but, fittingly, might already be over. Everyone back in the pool.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>Is writing work? The question sends books discourse into regular paroxysms. Rates are disclosed. Postings with a starting salary in NYC receive a measured response. Paeans to the dignity of the writing trade are juxtaposed with a tiered rejection from the <em>Coastal Nebraska Review<\/em> and calls for this nonprofit run out of a storage space on the Platte to increase its pay, however commendable, from the less-than-fair amount of fifty bucks.<\/p>\n<p>When a writer in workshop is told to \u201cearn\u201d plot contrivances in a short story, and revisions on a second draft are described as a particularly luckless rideshare shift, self-mythology is soon to follow. A real job is but a rite of passage, worked <em>instead<\/em>. The professional identity of \u201cwriter\u201d transcends a relatable protagonist\u2019s past as \u201cjust\u201d a waiter. To stave off this fate, today\u2019s working writers are \u201cproductive\u201d with their days spent in a rush to make aspirational word counts, and format the pitchdeck of self virtually required of them, all in service of an unworkable principle: to value their own work at precisely the time the market has priced that work at zero.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">We hear there\u2019s a thing that can help us cheat. <em>Oh, wow, can it help us feel cheated too?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>A book manuscript is a dying houseplant, mistakenly fed words. It <em>is<\/em> a lot of work. Only, unlike most work, it most often comes to nothing. To insist on writing, then, according to McGurl, is to insist on \u201cdestroying time, the time it takes to write the books that will sit inertly as lines of code on a server.\u201d And yet, liberating writing from the capitalist ethic has its own value. Rather than a piece of writing dignified by money, the work of writing is dignified by a reader\u2019s time.<\/p>\n<p>Because work can always be done faster. As the force-feeding of words to LLMs seemed to put writers at existential risk, a clumsy line of defense was drawn: that there was something definitively unmistakable about human writing. The suspicious em dash\u2014and the easily disprovable notion that only AI used them\u2014was offered as a telltale sign. Updated arguments have proved no more workable: distinguishing our \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/the-weekend-essay\/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art\">choices<\/a>\u201d from theirs, or laboring to define bad writing with better writing. There is no way to define human writing in the abstract; it is the act of writing, the process, that cannot be properly replicated without hours upon years of destroyed time. The uncanniness, in the debris, of hearing one\u2019s own voice. Of, one could say, finding it. It is not as if the only question of literature is <em>Can one be fooled?<\/em> Which, of course, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/fault-lines\/can-ai-produce-writing-that-we-actually-want-to-read\">we can<\/a>. And so what? We hear there\u2019s a thing that can help us cheat. <em>Oh, wow, can it help us feel cheated too?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>There are very real representational problems with regard to realism, phones, and internet life\u2019s microwave instructions for rendering the literal ironic and the ironic literal. On the other hand, the constraints are phantoms: Big Data cliches, Balkanized audiences eating up cliched ethnography. The displacement of little magazines by Substack\u2019s incentives makes for a venue shortage, but the fracturing of audience is another abstraction, just as easily replaced by something more visceral: a popular revolt against runaway artifice and its adoption by corporate culture. If authenticity should be once more the high principle of culture, writers have a free hand to take up the mantle of universality\u2014however riddled with contradiction, false sentiment\u2014and write the social novel of the way we live now. The novel\u2019s real and true question\u2014\u201cWhat do you think about when you masturbate?\u201d\u2014rings eternal, propelling our narratives, compelling us to do the work of conscience.<\/p>\n<p>Though our words may amount to nothing but feed for the servers, our mere existence composes a letter to young Submitters, its message loud and not very clear: It doesn\u2019t matter who you are, it only matters what you have to say, or vice versa; be relentless, never quit; outline the plot, lose the plot, username, password, username, password. Believe in your novel, which you made up; vow revenge on the NEA. Make an unsolicited life for yourself\u2014make every which way you turn into a Wendy\u2019s. Take every last thing personally\u2014leave nothing to chance. If you have a short biographical statement to make, which is to say in 500 words connect who you are with near certain failure, state it now though the heavens fall. Username, password. To spend one\u2019s life at the desk is to sit with one\u2019s unlived lives; to make peace with destroyed time, to submit, submit, submit. In one of those lives unlived you are a writer; in one of those unlived lives you have heard a reply.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p><small><a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\">[1]<\/a> Take the self-pub-starters of the <em>NYT<\/em> Paperback Trade Fiction list of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/books\/best-sellers\/2026\/05\/03\/trade-fiction-paperback\/\">May 3<\/a>, 2026: Andy Weir, whose first book, <em>The Martian<\/em>, was serialized on his personal website; Freida McFadden, who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/06\/22\/books\/freida-mcfadden-thriller-best-seller.html\">self-published for a decade<\/a> before Netflix adapted <em>The Housemaid<\/em>; Matt Dinniman, popularizer of the \u201clitRPG\u201d genre, started out on a self-pub platform, then moved on to KDP, where SJ Tilly aims for a book a month; singer-songwriter and septuagenarian lawyer Allen Levi had already sold 150,000 copies of <em>Theo of Golden<\/em> himself before Simon &amp; Schuster bet they could sell at least a few more (37 weeks on the list, mostly atop it); and Navessa Allen straight-up posted chapters on Goodreads before signing on to Zando and PRH\u2019s arguably narrower distribution. Pointedly, none were discovered according to an agent\u2019s discriminating taste or molded by an editor into a font of commercial storytelling.<\/small><\/p>\n<p><small><a href=\"#_ftnref2\" name=\"_ftn2\">[2]<\/a> Graduates of Harvard, a prestigious college not in Boston but nearby, have 17 times the chance of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/who-gets-to-be-a-writer\/\">winning a literary prize<\/a>, but a degree from Iowa confers an edge to the tune of 49 times.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the true beginner, there can be no end. From the moment they sit at the desk, the unemerged writer faces a step-by-step gauntlet of workshopping, applying, contesting; of liking screenshots of Publishers Weekly deals announcements, making astral connections between<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":275853,"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":[43201,43069,6,43070,43092],"tags":[2120,111817,91128,111815,2126,72315,111816,3694,111818,4026,16005,108206],"class_list":["post-275843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-newsandculture","tag-amazon","tag-big-fiction","tag-dan-sinykin","tag-laura-mcgrath","tag-m-c-mah","tag-mark-mcgurl","tag-middlemen","tag-on-writing","tag-program-era","tag-publishing","tag-submissions","tag-the-business-of-writing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19L5","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-2026-08-17T134757.480.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275843","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\/143"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275726,"date":"2026-08-19T06:41:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275726"},"modified":"2026-08-19T07:06:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:06:39","slug":"did-smartphones-really-kill-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/did-smartphones-really-kill-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Smartphones Really Kill Reading?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Did smartphones kill reading? In <i>The Atlantic<\/i>, Rose Horowitch laments that \u201cThe Age of Reading is Over.\u201d We still, she observes, encounter many words, but increasingly find them in emails, text messages, Instagram captions, and other digital fragments rather than in books. This kind of reading tends to be brief and distracted, quite different from the focused attention encouraged by print.<\/p>\n<p>Modern readers may still be able to decode words, Horowitch argues, but they struggle to comprehend longer texts. Our society is not illiterate, but postliterate.<\/p>\n<p>It is tempting to blame smartphones for this condition and conclude that some kind of ban would solve the problem. But a historical perspective shows that this is not enough: reading was in decline before the smartphone appeared.<\/p>\n<p>In 1988, the literary critic George Steiner announced that \u201cthe age of the book\u201d was coming to \u201ca gradual end.\u201d Gradual is the key word here. Steiner believed the decline had begun in the 1950s, with the growth of radio, cinema, and television. The electronic media of the 1980s continued the transformation but did not initiate it.<\/p>\n<p>The data support Steiner\u2019s instinct. In 1976, more than 60 percent of American 12th-graders said they read a book or magazine for pleasure almost every day. From then on, the share declined by about one percentage point a year through the arrival of video games, personal computers, the internet, and smartphones. Forty years later, only 15 percent of high school students read for pleasure almost every day.<\/p>\n<p>The introduction of the internet and smartphones did not produce a sudden collapse of reading. Americans spent an average of 21.9 minutes a day reading for personal interest in 2003, compared with 18.3 minutes in 2010 and 16.2 minutes in 2025. These figures indicate no sudden break coinciding with the arrival of the iPhone, but a long, steady decline.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">First, protect the printed book.<\/p>\n<p>Technology is part of the story, but not the whole story. What has eroded, more broadly, is the culture that once made reading part of everyday life. To understand how this happened\u2014and how it might be reversed\u2014we must take a longer historical view.<\/p>\n<p>Reading became a popular practice in the nineteenth century, thanks to a combination of material and social changes. Cheaper paper, steam-powered printing, compulsory education, and improved lighting made books accessible to millions. Libraries, churches, labor movements, literary societies, and reading circles gave people reasons to read and communities in which to do so. Together, these developments created a bookish culture.<\/p>\n<p>In nineteenth-century Paris, a visitor marveled at the widespread appetite for literature: \u201cEveryone, but women in particular, is carrying a book in their pocket. People read while riding in carriages or taking walks; they read at the theatre during the interval, in caf\u00e9s, even when bathing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The flourishing reading culture of this era was sustained by an entire ecosystem. If we wish to restore it, it will not be enough to remove one distracting device. Instead, we must rebuild the conditions that make concentrated reading possible. This requires at least three things.<\/p>\n<p>First, protect the printed book.<\/p>\n<p>The printed book is a technology built for attention. It presents the text without the competing demands of hyperlinks, videos, or notifications, allowing us to remain focused on the page. At the same time, the thickness of the book helps us gauge our location in the story or argument, and keeps us oriented by giving us a sense of how far we have travelled and how much remains. This materiality supports memory as well: we often remember where on a page we encountered something\u2014whether it was on the right or left, high or low.<\/p>\n<p>Digital devices can help us find information quickly, but print is better suited to focused reading. Schools therefore need to continue championing books, yet the trend has lately moved in the opposite direction. In 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English declared that it was time to \u201cdecenter book reading\u201d in order to address \u201cinequalities in digital technologies and competencies.\u201d But equity can be used as an argument in support of the opposite approach. Children who do not grow up surrounded by books depend on schools to introduce them to sustained reading. Like computers, printed books are a technology that must be learned.<\/p>\n<p>Second, we need spaces where reading is the norm.<\/p>\n<p>We often treat concentration as a private test of willpower. But attention is shaped by architecture, atmosphere, and social expectations. We behave differently in a library than in a shopping mall because rooms tell us what kinds of activity belong there.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">Today, communal reading offers an example of how print and digital media can work in tandem to renew reading.<\/p>\n<p>Libraries, independent bookstores, schools, and caf\u00e9s can become what Steiner called \u201chouses of reading\u201d: places where silence, slowness, and absorption are not eccentric forms of behavior. In Norway, media scholar Espen Ytreberg introduced voluntary \u201cshut up and read\u201d sessions, in which students gather in rooms free from digital distractions and read silently together. There are also caf\u00e9s which ask customers to put away their phones. Such spaces create temporary refuges from the digital stream, and allow habits of slowness, concentration, and absorption to become socially reinforced.<\/p>\n<p>Third, make reading social again.<\/p>\n<p>The image of the reader is usually solitary: one person alone with a book. But throughout history, reading has repeatedly been renewed by communities. When the Dark Ages descended on the ancient world, Benedict of Nursia ignited a monastic revival that would establish thousands of monasteries and train generations of devoted readers. And in the nineteenth century, religious revivals, the labor movement, African American communities, and other popular movements organized circles that fused reading with collective action. Books mattered not only because they were read, but because people read them together.<\/p>\n<p>Today, communal reading offers an example of how print and digital media can work in tandem to renew reading. Online book clubs, fan sites, and discussion forums foster literary communities in which devoted readers not only discuss what they have read but also extend the stories through fan fiction. At the same time, some students have founded \u201cLuddite clubs,\u201d where digital devices are banned and members gather to read and converse.<\/p>\n<p>If we want reading to endure, tossing our smartphones into the nearest river will not be enough. Good readers are formed by a bookish culture, and it is this culture that we must try and rebuild. Reading will never survive as an individual act of heroic resistance; history shows that reading is and always has been a solitary act sustained by communities.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\">__________________________________<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275744\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/did-smartphones-really-kill-reading\/reading-matters-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/reading-matters.avif\" data-orig-size=\"596,893\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"reading matters\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/reading-matters.avif\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275744 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/reading-matters-200x300.avif\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/reading-matters-200x300.avif 200w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/reading-matters-40x60.avif 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/reading-matters-33x50.avif 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/reading-matters.avif 596w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/reading-matters-a-history-for-the-digital-age-joel-halldorf\/1751bf1db629999e?ean=9781479840731&amp;bkshp-astro=t\">Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age<\/a>\u00a0<em>by Joel Halldorf is available from NYU Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Did smartphones kill reading? In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch laments that \u201cThe Age of Reading is Over.\u201d We still, she observes, encounter many words, but increasingly find them in emails, text messages, Instagram captions, and other digital fragments rather than<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30705,"featured_media":275745,"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":[6,43092,43445],"tags":[10642,111020,30826,85998,168,111019,11975,5582],"class_list":["post-275726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-newsandculture","category-technology","tag-book-clubs","tag-joel-halldorf","tag-nyu-press","tag-printed-books","tag-reading","tag-reading-matters-a-history-for-the-digital-age","tag-smartphones","tag-technology"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Jc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/smartphones.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275726","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\/30705"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275706,"date":"2026-08-19T06:40:06","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275706"},"modified":"2026-08-19T06:55:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:55:18","slug":"on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/","title":{"rendered":"On Women and The Water Cure: Nine Memoirs About Wild Swimming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWild swimming\u201d is a term coined by British nature writer Roger Deakin in his cult classic <i>Waterlog: A Swimmer\u2019s Journey Through Britain<\/i> (1999), about his year swimming outdoors all over the UK. A paean to the joys of daily, year-round immersion in rivers, seas, ponds, and lakes<i>, <\/i>it sparked a nationwide cultural phenomenon with a catchy name, a society, a swim trip company, and an entire line of gear for changing onshore. As practiced in Britain and Ireland, wild swimming might more properly be termed \u201ccold-water bathing,\u201d since it can involve merely a few minutes of head-raised breaststroke in water temperatures ranging from heart-stopping to extremity-numbing (35-60\u00baF), clad in nothing but a swimsuit and a wooly hat. Most wild swimmers are not athletes training for an open-water event or even necessarily very proficient at swimming. They do it for wellbeing and connection, as a way of being in touch with the natural world and the seasons.<\/p>\n<p>In my UK childhood, I felt an ease in the water that I rarely did on land, though I never swam competitively. Early moves from England to Ireland to Nigeria and then back to England had left me feeling an irremediable outsider. In water\u2019s reassuring embrace, however, I felt confident and at home. Swimming (both indoors and out) is a practice I\u2019ve carried with me as I\u2019ve triangulated my life between the US, Spain, and the UK. As I wrote my memoir <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/unbelonging-a-life-in-search-of-home-catherine-jagoe\/953e1a4767dd7fd0?ean=9780299357948&amp;next=t\"><i>Unbelonging: A Life in Search of Home<\/i><\/a>, I was surprised to find how often I drew on memories of swimming. Water has been the translucent thread that runs through my transnational life, connecting me more deeply with place while reminding me of the fluid borders of the self.<\/p>\n<p>The UK\u2019s Outdoor Swimming Society, founded in 2006, initially boasted 300 members, but now numbers over 200,000. Intriguingly, the Society found in a 2023 survey that roughly three-quarters of its members are women. Over the last ten years, there have been a spate of memoirs about wild swimming penned by women around the UK and Ireland, many of which appeared in 2017, meaning they must have all been written concurrently. These narratives portray open-water swimming not as heroism but as healing and empowerment. Their authors swim for the interior journey, to commune with a place and the elements, with other women, and their own bodies.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275709\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/the-outrun-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-outrun-1.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"600,900\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"the outrun\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-outrun-1.jpeg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275709 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-outrun-1-200x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-outrun-1-200x300.jpeg 200w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-outrun-1-40x60.jpeg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-outrun-1-33x50.jpeg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-outrun-1.jpeg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Amy Liptrot, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/the-outrun-a-memoir-amy-liptrot\/514edaa50ea99b46?ean=9780393355598&amp;next=t\"><i>The Outrun: A Memoir<\/i><\/a><i>\u00a0<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Amy Liptrot\u2019s raw, luminous memoir about moving back to the Orkney Islands and striving to heal from drug abuse and alcoholism became a surprise bestseller after its publication in 2016. The bleakness of those far northern isles, the punishing, incessant wind, the wild beauty of the land and rugged coastline are unforgettably conjured alongside her inner struggle to stay sober. Late in the book, she joins the mostly-female Orkney Polar Bears for their convivial Saturday dips in the gelid seas off the islands. Along with walking, farm chores, and birding, her wild swims become an essential component of her recovery, each dip leaving her exhilarated, \u201creborn and very alive\u201d. In the water, she experiences a sense of elemental, existential connection, a sort of spiritual dissolving. Sea swims don\u2019t magically cure the narrator, but they provide the container for healing to occur over time, gentling the existential ache of not-belonging that underlay her addictions.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275710\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/swimming-with-seals\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swimming-with-seals.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"600,921\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"swimming with seals\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swimming-with-seals.jpeg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275710 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swimming-with-seals-195x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swimming-with-seals-195x300.jpeg 195w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swimming-with-seals-39x60.jpeg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swimming-with-seals-33x50.jpeg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swimming-with-seals.jpeg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Victoria Whitworth, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/swimming-with-seals-victoria-whitworth\/b714b1991454a249?ean=9781838937447&amp;next=t\">Swimming With Seals<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Novelist and academic Victoria Whitworth lived on Orkney at the same time as Liptrot and swam alone daily as well as with the Orkney Polar Bears. She interweaves lyrical snapshots of her wild swims with discussions of local history, myth, folklore and archeology, braiding in memories of growing up in Kenya, her struggle with crippling pain due to plantar fasciitis, and glancing references to \u201cthe slow-motion misery of a failing marriage.\u201d The narrative is punctuated by prose-poems about the water conditions during her swims, which varied enormously from day to day and month to month, sometimes exquisite, sometimes terrifying. She prefers to swim at dawn or dusk, with no wetsuit separating her from the water. By the end of the book, she writes, \u201c[s]wimming in the sea has helped me rediscover myself \u2026 made me understand the strengths of my body, as well as its limits. It has been fundamental in healing my feet, but, more than that, it has allowed me to fall in love with being embodied all over again. With being alive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275711\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/turning\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/turning.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"258,400\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"turning\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/turning.jpeg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275711 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/turning-194x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/turning-194x300.jpeg 194w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/turning-39x60.jpeg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/turning-32x50.jpeg 32w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/turning.jpeg 258w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Jessica J. Lee, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/turning-a-year-in-the-water-jessica-j-lee\/fbd0551865e79077?ean=9780735233287&amp;next=t\">Turning: A Year in the Water<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Jessica J. Lee\u2019s first book <i>Turning<\/i> gained her international recognition as a writer who explores themes of multinational identity, migration, language, and environmental history. Seamlessly blending lyrical memoir, science writing and travelogue, <i>Turning<\/i> covers her first year in Berlin. In the grip of depression, repeated displacement (she is British-Canadian-Taiwanese), and a broken heart, she decides to swim in a different lake every week for a year. The book is notable for its intellectual depth and evocative descriptions of finding and entering the many lakes, as well as the vivid sensory impressions of swimming in each different location. In January, she carries a hammer as all the lakes are frozen, and risks hypothermia by submerging in them alone. As well as the agony of cold, she documents its after-effect of intense elation, a high many wild swimmers come to crave.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275712\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/swell\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swell.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"1303,2000\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"swell\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swell-667x1024.jpeg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275712 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swell-195x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swell-195x300.jpeg 195w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swell-667x1024.jpeg 667w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swell-768x1179.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swell-39x60.jpeg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swell-1001x1536.jpeg 1001w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swell-33x50.jpeg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/swell.jpeg 1303w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Jenny Landreth, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.barnesandnoble.com\/w\/swell-jenny-landreth\/1128564256\"><i>Swell: A Waterbiography<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Jenny Landreth invented a fantastic punning term for the emerging genre in her subtitle, \u201ca waterbiography.\u201d She provides a wealth of social and historical context, braiding her own evolving experience of swimming with the history of women\u2019s two-hundred-year struggle for parity of access to public waters and mixed bathing. She deflates the male Swimmer as Hero trope by stressing her distinctly unheroic learning process: \u201cI could maybe manage two or three widths, but I still swum in a U-shape and I still didn\u2019t get my hair wet.\u201d Even though her memoir begins by stressing her incompetence, it ends by affirming the pleasure and confidence open-water swimming bestows on her in middle age.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275713\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/at-the-pond\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"1553,2339\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"at the pond\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond-680x1024.jpeg\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-275713 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond-199x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"199\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond-199x300.jpeg 199w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond-680x1024.jpeg 680w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond-768x1157.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond-40x60.jpeg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond-1020x1536.jpeg 1020w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond-1360x2048.jpeg 1360w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond-33x50.jpeg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/at-the-pond.jpeg 1553w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/dauntbookspublishing.co.uk\/book\/at-the-pond-swimming-at-the-hampstead-ladies-pond\/\"><i>At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies\u2019 Pond<\/i><\/a> edited by Deborah Moggach\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Opened in 1926, the women-only pond on Hampstead Heath is a beloved London institution. All the essays collected here are by writers who happen to swim, rather than swimmers who happen to write, including luminaries like Margaret Drabble, Esther Freud, and Leanne Shapton. Organized by season, the pieces vividly evoke the women\u2019s experiences of the water at different times of year. \u201cThe water is silky,\u201d Lou Stoppard writes about winter. \u201cIt\u2019s thicker than other water. It sticks to the skin, laps your body and holds you, suspended. You cut through it, as if stirring cream.\u201d Some offer heartwarming stories of how swimming there helped them through difficult periods, provided community and continuity, and reconnected them to their bodies and the more-than-human world. Others explore the history and geography of the ponds and the Heath, and the social worlds of the swimmers and their circles.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275714\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/the-green-hill\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-green-hill.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"400,643\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"the green hill\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-green-hill.jpeg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275714 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-green-hill-187x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"187\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-green-hill-187x300.jpeg 187w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-green-hill-37x60.jpeg 37w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-green-hill-31x50.jpeg 31w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-green-hill.jpeg 400w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 187px) 100vw, 187px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Sophie Pierce, <a href=\"https:\/\/wiltonsquarebooks.com\/products\/the-green-hill\"><i>The Green Hill: Letters to a Son<\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0Pierce, who has since co-authored five regional wild swimming guides about Devon and Cornwall, lost her twenty-year-old son suddenly and unexpectedly in 2017. In the agonizing years after his death, she composed letters to him during walks and swims, a practice of active mourning in places they had enjoyed together. These form the spine of the book, interwoven with descriptions of swims of varying lengths in a very wide range of locales\u2014rivers, waterfalls, ponds, different coves and beaches, each different and beautifully captured for the reader. Over a five-year period, we witness her emerge from utter devastation to a more-bearable form of grief.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275715\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/the-tidal-year\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-tidal-year.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"814,1250\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"the tidal year\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-tidal-year-667x1024.jpeg\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-275715 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-tidal-year-195x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-tidal-year-195x300.jpeg 195w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-tidal-year-667x1024.jpeg 667w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-tidal-year-768x1179.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-tidal-year-39x60.jpeg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-tidal-year-33x50.jpeg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-tidal-year.jpeg 814w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Freya Bromley, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hachette.co.uk\/titles\/freya-bromley\/the-tidal-year\/9781399709699\/\"><i>The Tidal Year: A Memoir on Grief, Swimming, and Sisterhood<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Grieving and adrift in the aftermath of her teenage brother\u2019s death from bone cancer, Bromley embarks on a year-long quest to swim every tidal pool in mainland Britain in a year with her friend Miri. Tidal pools are deep hollows in the rock that fill with seawater on an ebb tide, offering \u201cthe ability of enjoy the salt of the sea in a safe watery cradle,\u201d ideal for swimmers who don\u2019t want to brave the dangers of the open ocean. Descriptions of the dozens of beautiful (and occasionally disappointing) locations they visit are inspiring, and the swimming-induced self-discovery and the solace of female friendship create a redemptive arc.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275716\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/glimmering\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/glimmering.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"389,600\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"glimmering\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/glimmering.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275716 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/glimmering-195x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/glimmering-195x300.jpg 195w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/glimmering-39x60.jpg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/glimmering-32x50.jpg 32w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/glimmering.jpg 389w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Megan Hayes, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.serenbooks.com\/product\/glimmering-paperback\/\"><i>Glimmering: Healing in Twenty-One Wild Swims<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Hayes suffered unspecified childhood trauma and is, at the outset of the book, in a damaging relationship with a manipulative, sex-addicted boyfriend. Her wild swims at beautiful spots in Wales and around the world offer well-being and safety in \u201cglimmers,\u201d the term coined by trauma specialist Deb Dana for \u201cmoments of regulation and connection.\u201d Hayes\u2019 memoir stresses the redemptive power of nature as an antidote to suffering and a way to build emotional resilience.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\">__________________________________<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275717\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/unbelonging\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/unbelonging.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"900,1350\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"unbelonging\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/unbelonging-683x1024.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275717 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/unbelonging-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/unbelonging-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/unbelonging-683x1024.jpg 683w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/unbelonging-768x1152.jpg 768w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/unbelonging-40x60.jpg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/unbelonging-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/unbelonging.jpg 900w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/uwpress.wisc.edu\/Books\/U\/Unbelonging\">Unbelonging<\/a>\u00a0<em>by Catherine Jagoe is available from University of Wisconsin Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWild swimming\u201d is a term coined by British nature writer Roger Deakin in his cult classic Waterlog: A Swimmer\u2019s Journey Through Britain (1999), about his year swimming outdoors all over the UK. A paean to the joys of daily, year-round<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31654,"featured_media":275718,"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":[6,43287,43103,43231,43092,43135],"tags":[26368,111750,111759,111751,111754,111757,111748,58640,111756,111752,111749,71733,111753,111746,111755,111747,111758,71734],"class_list":["post-275706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-health","category-memoir","category-nature","category-newsandculture","category-readinglists","tag-amy-liptrot","tag-at-the-pond-swimming-at-the-hampstead-ladies-pond","tag-catherine-jagoe","tag-deborah-moggach","tag-freya-bromley","tag-glimmering-healing-in-twenty-one-wild-swims","tag-jenny-landreth","tag-jessica-j-lee","tag-megan-hayes","tag-sophie-pierce","tag-swell-a-waterbiography","tag-swimming-with-seals","tag-the-green-hill-letters-to-a-son","tag-the-outrun-a-memoir","tag-the-tidal-year-a-memoir-on-grief-swimming-and-sisterhood","tag-turning-a-year-in-the-water","tag-unbelonging","tag-victoria-whitworth"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19IS","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/wild-swimming.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275706","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\/31654"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275888,"date":"2026-08-19T06:30:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275888"},"modified":"2026-08-19T09:05:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T13:05:03","slug":"lit-hub-daily-august-19-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-august-19-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: August 19, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"caption\"> TODAY: In 1631, John Dryden, England&#8217;s first poet laureate, is born. <\/span>\n<ul>\n<li>How environmentalism shows up <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-ursula-k-le-guin-channeled-her-environmentalism-into-fiction\">in Ursula K. Le Guin&#8217;s fiction<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/literary-criticism\/\">Criticism<\/a><\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The vast majority of contemporary literature is not in fact published but <em>submitted<\/em>.&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-submitters-on-the-literary-economy-of-unreadness\">On publishing, careerism, and Laura McGrath\u2019s <em>Middlemen<\/em><\/a><em>.\u00a0<\/em>| Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/craft-and-advice\/\">Craft<\/a><\/li>\n<li>How the tragedy of Jason Arday reflects <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-accusations-against-black-academics-point-to-the-real-end-of-woke-1-0\/\">a rigged game for today\u2019s Black scholars<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/politics\/\">Politics<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Catherine Jagoe <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-women-and-the-water-cure-nine-memoirs-about-wild-swimming\/\">recommends memoirs about wild swimming by<\/a> Amy Liptrot, Sophie Pierce, Megan Hayes, and more. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/readinglists\/\">Reading Lists<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Did smartphones really kill reading? <a href=\"http:\/\/lithub.com\/did-smartphones-really-kill-reading\">Or was it already in decline?<\/a> | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/technology\/\">Technology<\/a><\/li>\n<li>These 11 books by Tove Jansson, Katie Kitamura, Ntozake Shange, and more <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\">follow women who rewrote life and art<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/readinglists\/\">Reading Lists<\/a><\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Dusk fell in the shed, no wind, but the weather clearing. She split some logs, breathed in the scent.&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/range\">Read from Dorthe Nors&#8217;s novel <em>Range<\/em><\/a>, translated by Caroline Waight. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/fictionandpoetry\/from-the-novel\/\">Fiction<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Take a(n illustrated) stroll through <a href=\"https:\/\/orionmagazine.org\/article\/the-lost-vocabulary-of-whaling\/\">the lost vocabulary of whaling<\/a>, from greasy luck to blubber room. | Orion<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/articles\/1820031\/the-truth-is-in-the-detail\">Lucy Ives presents a theory of Paul Celan<\/a>: \u201cHere is a wild proposition, then: Celan didn\u2019t write in any language\u2026he was writing in between languages.\u201d | Poetry<\/li>\n<li>Nuncore is upon us: Paul Michael Johnson considers the new books, music, and other pieces of art and media <a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/can-centuries-old-nuns-really-save-us-from-ourselves\/\">fueling the culture\u2019s fixation on nuns<\/a>. | Public Books<\/li>\n<li>Will we ever know if <i>Life of M<\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thecut.com\/article\/is-rachel-cusk-new-book-really-about-natalie-portman.html\">is about Natalie Portman?<\/a> | The Cut<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedial.world\/articles\/news\/why-read-science-fiction\">How science fiction writers imagine different, better worlds<\/a> by \u201dstraining at the bounds of the possible.\u201d | The Dial<\/li>\n<li>Anthropic\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.404media.co\/anthropics-text-watermarking-proves-ai-companies-do-not-care-at-all-about-writing\/\">watermark for text generated by Claude<\/a> \u201cwill not be distinguishable to readers.\u201d That\u2019s code for \u201ccompletely useless.\u201d | 404 Media<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How environmentalism shows up in Ursula K. Le Guin&#8217;s fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism &#8220;The vast majority of contemporary literature is not in fact published but submitted.&#8221; On publishing, careerism, and Laura McGrath\u2019s Middlemen.\u00a0| Lit Hub Craft How the tragedy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":275889,"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":[45236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lit-hub-daily"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19LO","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JohnDryden.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275888","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\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275787,"date":"2026-08-19T06:03:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275787"},"modified":"2026-08-19T07:04:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:04:52","slug":"11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/","title":{"rendered":"11 Books About Women Who Rewrote Life and Art"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve been on the hunt for books by women for as long as I can remember. My favorite stories are usually not romances, but stories of women trying to make sense of how they can be the main characters in their own lives, even when people around them keep relegating them to supporting roles. In high school in Seattle, I would get off the bus a few stops early to comb the shelves of B. Bailey Books. I was on the hunt for new books with that distinctive dark green Virago spine, ravenous for stories of women\u2019s lives. I devoured Antonia White\u2019s <i>Frost in May<\/i>, a spectacular story about an unhappy schoolgirl, and was undone by Radclyffe Hall\u2019s <i>The Unlit Lamp<\/i>\u2014a devastatingly intense story of having a crush on a teacher.<\/p>\n<p>As I worked on my book, <i>Her Own Voice: Eight Women Who Rewrote Life and Art <\/i>(Beacon 2026), I kept track of books that echoed my book\u2019s themes and resonated with the ideas and preoccupations of the women I was focusing on. My eight women are divided into wanderers, rebels, explorers, and mentors. These broad themes stretch us outside the confines of looking for an appropriate spouse. The books below expand our ideas of what a woman\u2019s life can be and narratives can do. Here, then, are some books that help continue these themes in a different voice.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><i>WANDERERS<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275788\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/the-summer-book-3\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-summer-book.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"250,400\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"the summer book\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-summer-book.jpeg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275788 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-summer-book-188x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"188\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-summer-book-188x300.jpeg 188w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-summer-book-38x60.jpeg 38w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-summer-book-31x50.jpeg 31w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-summer-book.jpeg 250w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 188px) 100vw, 188px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Tove Jansson,<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/the-summer-book-tove-jansson\/183c66dfaf39c4e0?ean=9781590172681&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i> The Summer Book<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The children\u2019s book author Margaret Wise Brown, one of the women I write about, divided her life between New York City and an island in Maine. Brown loved her summers on an island off the coast of Maine nearly as much as the Finnish-Swedish Tove Jannson, creator of the Moomin stories, loved her time in the islands off the Swedish coast. It\u2019s lovely to spend some time in Jansson\u2019s imagination, swimming in the cold water, enjoying long summer days, watching for the mail boat to come. This book is a northern island vacation between two covers.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275789\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/kairos-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kairos.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,890\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"kairos\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kairos.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275789 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kairos-202x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"202\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kairos-202x300.jpg 202w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kairos-40x60.jpg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kairos-34x50.jpg 34w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kairos.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 202px) 100vw, 202px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Jenny Erpenbeck, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/kairos-jenny-erpenbeck\/66f5e3194c8f8b86?ean=9780811238533&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><em>Kairos<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Born and raised in the former East Germany, Erpenbeck writes beautifully of the strangeness of living in the before and after of a divided Germany. This novel tells the story of an age-gap relationship from the perspective of the young woman who embarks on an affair with a married man with open eyes and a clear sense of why this is what she wants. In this, Erpenbeck\u2019s heroine\u2019s desire\u2014for sex and experience\u2014resonates with another of my subjects, Eileen Chang, whose stories of love affairs conducted during the Chinese Civil War are similarly unembarrassed to depict what it is to be a woman with desire. Both Chang and Erpenbeck are unflinching in chronicling the specific, mundane precautions necessary to lovers under surveillance.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><i>REBELS<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275790\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/intimacies-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/intimacies.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"600,936\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"intimacies\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/intimacies.jpeg\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-275790 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/intimacies-192x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"192\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/intimacies-192x300.jpeg 192w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/intimacies-38x60.jpeg 38w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/intimacies-32x50.jpeg 32w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/intimacies.jpeg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 192px) 100vw, 192px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Katie Kitamura,<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/intimacies-katie-kitamura\/2119de9e8b00a41b?ean=9780399576171&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i> Intimacies<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Vera Brittain\u2019s <i>Testament of Youth<\/i> comes to the admission of the many traumas she suffered as a nurse in World War One only gradually. She recounts her bravery and her determination and only after the war can she admit how grief stricken, tired, and disheartened she has become. Similarly, Kitamura\u2019s unnamed protagonist only gradually shares the traumas she suffers as a translator at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Her job is to translate, not to think, edit, or opine. Thus, every workday she sits and speaks the words of a notorious and evil ex-president, a man who has committed horrific war crimes. Having those atrocities, and his denials, spoken into her headphones, has a powerful effect. These are women who put themselves in danger, live in denial, and only belatedly reckon with the cost of their choices. The elegance and restraint of Brittain and Kitamura\u2019s narratives intensify the unfolding impact.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275791\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/days-of-afrekete\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/days-of-afrekete.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,928\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"days of afrekete\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/days-of-afrekete.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275791 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/days-of-afrekete-194x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/days-of-afrekete-194x300.jpg 194w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/days-of-afrekete-39x60.jpg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/days-of-afrekete-32x50.jpg 32w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/days-of-afrekete.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Asali Solomon, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/the-days-of-afrekete-a-novel-asali-solomon\/2d847a9af0c803fd?ean=9781250858832&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><em>Days of Afrekete<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Asali Solomon\u2019s novel spends much of its narrative looking back to the protagonist Liselle\u2019s long-ago relationship with her ex-girlfriend. It\u2019s a surprising and defensive act as Liselle, who is Black, is giving a dinner party on the eve of her white husband\u2019s political downfall. The tension, the uncertainty, the hovering between bravery and cowardice captures some of what fascinated me in Muriel Rukeyser\u2019s novel <i>Savage Coast<\/i>. Usually, Rukeyser is utterly fearless, but I find it so heartening to read about the moments of hesitation right before being brave, something both Solomon and Rukeyser beautifully convey. <i>Days of Afrekete<\/i> is also a riff on Virginia Woolf\u2019s <i>Mrs. Dalloway<\/i>\u2014another single day novel about a rich woman throwing a dinner party. Rukeyser admired Woolf and mentored young Black writers, including Alice Walker, so the connections between Rukeyser, Woolf, and Solomon are rich.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><i>EXPLORERS<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275793\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/the-time-of-doves-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-time-of-doves-1.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,965\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"the time of doves\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-time-of-doves-1.jpg\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-275793 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-time-of-doves-1-187x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"187\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-time-of-doves-1-187x300.jpg 187w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-time-of-doves-1-37x60.jpg 37w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-time-of-doves-1-31x50.jpg 31w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-time-of-doves-1.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 187px) 100vw, 187px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Merc\u00e8 Rodoreda,<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/the-time-of-the-doves-merc-rodoreda\/a910423fb1a36668?ean=9780915308750&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i> The Time of the Doves (La pla\u00e7a del Diamant)<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A clear-eyed, unsentimental realist in her life, Sylvia Townsend Warner excelled at depicting people helplessly caught in the larger forces of history. The great Catalan writer Merc\u00e8 Rodoreda was forced into exile during the Spanish Civil War. Living in France as a refugee, she was so poor so busy with menial work that she could not write for years. When she returned to writing, she told this story of a young shop girl whose husband decides, as the Civil War breaks out, to keep pigeons on the roof of their cramped apartment. Plagued by pigeon droppings and unclear why her husband has left (to fight with the Republicans in the mountains outside Barcelona), Colometa has to feed her children without money and figure out her life and her place in it with little help from anyone.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275798\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/for-colored-girls\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/for-colored-girls.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,914\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"for colored girls\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/for-colored-girls.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275798 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/for-colored-girls-197x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"197\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/for-colored-girls-197x300.jpg 197w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/for-colored-girls-39x60.jpg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/for-colored-girls-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/for-colored-girls.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 197px) 100vw, 197px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Ntozake Shange, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/for-colored-girls-who-have-considered-suicide-when-the-rainbow-is-enuf-ntozake-shange\/9ed0300f3fa2bfb7?ean=9780684843261&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i>for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Jamaican poet, playwright, editor, journalist, and broadcaster Una Marson would have delighted in the abundance of Shange\u2019s classic play. This set of interlocking monologues of Black womanhood speaks vividly and fully the the richness of Black women\u2019s experience. When I was growing up, this was constantly performed in repertory theaters, at colleges, and high schools. I\u2019ve started teaching it again, and my students find it revelatory. In her poems, Marson gives voice to many moods of the Jamaican diaspora. Shange\u2019s multivocal choreopoem is a fitting successor to that voice.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><i>MENTORS<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275799\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/an-illuminated-life\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/an-illuminated-life.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,912\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"an illuminated life\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/an-illuminated-life.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275799 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/an-illuminated-life-197x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"197\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/an-illuminated-life-197x300.jpg 197w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/an-illuminated-life-39x60.jpg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/an-illuminated-life-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/an-illuminated-life.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 197px) 100vw, 197px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Heidi Ardizzione,<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/an-illuminated-life-belle-da-costa-greene-s-journey-from-prejudice-to-privilege-heidi-ardizzone-ph-d\/c024d86659e13016?ean=9781324021643&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i> An Illuminated Life<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Jessie Redmon Fauset could not have passed for white, nor did she want to, but in her novels, she often reflected on the cruel asymmetries of the color line. In <i>Plum Bun<\/i>, Angela changes her name to Ang\u00e8le and moves to New York to take the painting classes she is barred from attending in Philadelphia. The opportunities for a white woman were slender in the early 20th century, but those for a Black woman were vanishingly small. Belle Da Costa Greene, the daughter of Richard T. Greener, one of the first Black graduates of Harvard, considered her options and chose to live as white. As Belle Greene (no longer Greener), she became J. P. Morgan\u2019s librarian and one of the world\u2019s experts in rare books, especially medieval manuscripts and early printed materials. Greene balanced her career with loyalty to her family and love affairs. Heidi Ardizzione\u2019s biography is a dishy story of a life richly lived.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275800\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/eves-hollywood\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/eves-hollywood.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,960\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"eve&amp;#8217;s hollywood\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/eves-hollywood.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275800 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/eves-hollywood-188x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"188\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/eves-hollywood-188x300.jpg 188w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/eves-hollywood-38x60.jpg 38w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/eves-hollywood-31x50.jpg 31w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/eves-hollywood.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 188px) 100vw, 188px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Eve Babitz,<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/eve-s-hollywood-eve-babitz\/5784f14fa15ee00c?ean=9781590178904&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i> Eve\u2019s Hollywood<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Hollywood adores a cool surface, but it attracts messy larger-than-life charismatic characters, people who constantly exceed the bounds of the screen with their drama. Lili Anolik is on to something in contrasting messy, warm Eve Babitz with the forever cool Joan Didion as she does in Didion and Babitz. Director Dorothy Arzner would seem to be a Didion, with her hair as thick and controlled as a Fuller brush and her tailored skirt suits. But that misses the delight Arzner took in her stars and in the backlot drama of the studios. Eve\u2019s Hollywood, gossipy and full of anecdote captures a more recent version of the conversations Arzner used to overhear at her father\u2019s Hollywood restaurant.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><i>BONUS TRACK\u00a0<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275801\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/moments-of-being\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/moments-of-being.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,905\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"moments of being\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/moments-of-being.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275801 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/moments-of-being-199x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"199\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/moments-of-being-199x300.jpg 199w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/moments-of-being-40x60.jpg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/moments-of-being-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/moments-of-being.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Virginia Woolf,<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/moments-of-being-the-virginia-woolf-library-authorized-edition-virginia-woolf\/3a082d0c992a2740?ean=9780156619189&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i> Moments of Being<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Woolf died with this autobiography incomplete, but it is a treasure and a delight. A collection of essays written at several stages of her life, the longest piece, \u201cA Sketch of the Past,\u201d blends real-time reports on the unfolding of the Blitzkrieg in London with her memories of childhood. It\u2019s one of the most intimate and moving ways to get a sense of Woolf the person. Her memories are sharp and rich in detail and she does not shy away from the many losses of her childhood. (Her mother died when she was thirteen.) Nor does she omit the abuse she suffered at the hands of her half-brothers. This is a survivor\u2019s story and a meditation on memory.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\">__________________________________<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"275802\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/11-books-about-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art\/her-own-voice\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/her-own-voice.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"600,928\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"her own voice\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/her-own-voice.jpeg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-275802 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/her-own-voice-194x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/her-own-voice-194x300.jpeg 194w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/her-own-voice-39x60.jpeg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/her-own-voice-32x50.jpeg 32w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/her-own-voice.jpeg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/her-own-voice-eight-women-who-rewrote-life-and-art-anne-e-fernald\/215a7d975771d9f9?ean=9780807021330&amp;bkshp-astro=t\">Her Own Voice: Eight Women Who Rewrote Life and Art<\/a>\u00a0<em>by Anne E. Fernald is available from Beacon Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve been on the hunt for books by women for as long as I can remember. My favorite stories are usually not romances, but stories of women trying to make sense of how they can be the main characters in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31689,"featured_media":275803,"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":[6,43101,43070,43092,43095,43135],"tags":[111798,111800,2355,17789,111795,9918,9917,10071,111797,111799,69869,23302,25715,16957,7815,100622,10072,84047,111796,39380,659],"class_list":["post-275787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-newsandculture","category-politics","category-readinglists","tag-an-illuminated-life","tag-anne-e-fernauld","tag-asali-solomon","tag-beacon-press","tag-days-of-afrekete","tag-eve-babitz","tag-eves-hollywood","tag-for-colored-girls-who-have-considered-suicide-when-the-rainbow-is-enuf","tag-heidi-ardizzione","tag-her-own-voice","tag-intimacies","tag-jenny-erpenbeck","tag-kairos","tag-katie-kitamura","tag-merce-rodoreda","tag-moments-of-being","tag-ntozake-shange","tag-the-summer-book","tag-the-time-of-the-doves-la-placa-del-diamant","tag-tove-jansson","tag-virginia-woolf"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Kb","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/womens-voices.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275787","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\/31689"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275850,"date":"2026-08-18T06:30:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T10:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275850"},"modified":"2026-08-18T09:37:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:37:32","slug":"lit-hub-daily-august-18-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-august-18-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: August 18, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"caption\"> TODAY: In 1958, <em>Lolita<\/em> is published in the United States. <\/span>\n<ul>\n<li>What <em>Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em> and <em>Angel<\/em> can teach us <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-grief-and-growing-up-in-buffy-the-vampire-slayer\">about grief, literature, and growing up<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/film-and-tv\/\">TV<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span class=\"byline\"><span class=\"byline\">Florence Hazrat explores <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-that-disgraceful-disreputable-wonderful-form-of-punctuation-the-parenthesis\/\">the surprisingly controversial history of <\/a><\/span><\/span>the parenthesis. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/history\/\">History<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Edwidge Danticat tells us <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/edwidge-danticat-wishes-her-former-english-teachers-would-read-her-work\">why she wishes her former teachers would read her work<\/a> and answers more of our questions about literary life. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/craft-and-advice\/\">Craft<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/joby-warrick-latoya-watkins-katy-simpson-smith-and-more-20-new-books-out-today\">The 20 new books out today<\/a> include titles by Joby Warrick, LaToya Watkins, Katy Simpson Smith, and more! | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/readinglists\/\">Reading Lists<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/chiang-rae-lee-on-channeling-his-immigrant-childhood-into-fiction\">Chiang-rae Lee talks to Jane Ciabattari<\/a> about how his family history and immigrant childhood influence his fiction. | Lit Hub<a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/in-conversation\/\"> In Conversation<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Why Earl Swift hiked the Appalachian Trail <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/why-i-hiked-the-appalachian-trail-twice-30-years-apart\">the first time (and the second).<\/a> | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/memoir\/\">Memoir<\/a><\/li>\n<li>&#8220;One day they were in love and the next, a manuscript appeared in his study, written in a language she didn\u2019t speak.&#8221; Read from <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-maltese-version\">Katy Simpson Smith&#8217;s new novel, <em>The Maltese Version<\/em><\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/fictionandpoetry\/from-the-novel\/\">Fiction<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Maria Adelmann reports on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/society\/adjuncting-until-the-end-of-time\/\">the crisis of the eternal adjunct<\/a>. | The Nation<\/li>\n<li>\u201cWe inhabit a world where the tendencies Hamlet embodied are magnified, and where opportunities for self-commentary are effectively continuous.\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/hedgehogreview.com\/issues\/the-fading-promise-of-higher-education\/articles\/freud-in-the-age-of-therapy-speak\">Anna Ballan on Freud in the age of therapy-speak<\/a>. | The Hedgehog Review<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/screenwriters-hollywood-mergers-paramount-warner-oracle-artificial-intelligence\/\">On AI, screenwriters, and the cost of free labor:<\/a> \u201cCreative workers have always been vulnerable to exploitation. The idea that the early stage of a career must involve \u201chope work\u201d (unpaid internships, apprenticeships, spec scripts, auditions, free gigs, etc.) is built in, and easily abused.\u201d | Los Angeles Review of Books<\/li>\n<li>In case you need <a href=\"https:\/\/www.404media.co\/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility\/\">another reason to dump Amazon<\/a>, the company is destroying books to train AI. | 404 Media<\/li>\n<li>Ellie Blackwood on <a href=\"https:\/\/reactormag.com\/three-ted-chiang-stories-that-broke-my-brain\/\">why \u201cTed Chiang\u2019s stories keep breaking my brain.\u201d<\/a> | Reactor<\/li>\n<li>In defense <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/culture\/2026\/08\/mary-oliver-documentary\/688305\/?utm_source=feed\">of loving Mary Oliver.<\/a> | The Atlantic<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel can teach us about grief, literature, and growing up. | Lit Hub TV Florence Hazrat explores the surprisingly controversial history of the parenthesis. | Lit Hub History Edwidge Danticat tells us why she<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":275852,"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":[45236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lit-hub-daily"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Lc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/lolita1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275850","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\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]