Lit Hub Daily: August 28, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1749, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is born.
- “Somebody wrote an article online that shit talks Fidel.” Profiling the cyber soldiers who crush internet dissent in Cuba. | Lit Hub Technology
- Huda Fakhreddine on Paul Celan and the necessity of Gaza to poetry: “If time must continue on its course after this, then it cannot but course toward a free Palestine.” | Lit Hub On Translation
- As AI invades classrooms, Joelle Renstrom looks back on the most human of study guides, CliffsNotes. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Maris Kreizman explains why books aren’t the solution to building empathy, but they definitely help: “We’re stuck in a moment when passive entertainment rules, when books are viewed by the ruling class as strictly utilitarian.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Kelly Sundberg recommends titles to read for your new life by Saeed Jones, River Selby, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- What if all the ice on earth suddenly melted? “Everything about this epoch is superlative, bizarre, unprecedented.” | Lit Hub Climate Change
- “They come under immediate assault from sandflies. Emil is beating them off his neck and shins the whole way, but it pleases him how well he manages the exertion.” Read from Olufemi Terry’s new novel, Wilderness of Mirrors. | Lit Hub Fiction
- A middle school teacher shares his strategy for engaging reluctant readers. | The Washington Post
- “To remember is to risk punishment”: Sajad Hameed and Rehan Qayoom Mir report on India’s book ban in Kashmir. | Jacobin
- Ahmad Almallah on the poetics of Palestine, American hypocrisy, and writing “between linguistic borderlands.” | Asymptote
- “I’ve since come to think of guilty pleasure only when I think about terrible beauty.” On the entwining legacies of climate change and family history in California. | Nautilus
- Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth read “The Lifted Veil,” George Eliot’s angsty tale of emo telepathy. | Reactor
- Tate McFadden interviews Sam Szabo about queer cartooning and comics history: “I always think about my creative process as being two channels in my brain. One is memoir and one is gags.” | The Comics Journal
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