Lit Hub Daily: August 8, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1818, a 22-year-old John Keats returns from a walking tour of Scotland, showing early signs that tuberculosis would kill him.
- “Sexting a man that you just met in a park is nothing like Jane Austen’s day.” Grace Aldridge asks, how would Austen define an accomplished woman in the present? | Lit Hub Criticism
- This week on The Lit Hub Podcast: Talking sonnets with Brad Lander • What happens when your small press wins the Booker Prize?! | Lit Hub Radio
- Jessica Gross on the challenge and technique of writing a New York novel while no longer living in New York. | Lit Hub Craft
- Should we call it The Metamorphosis or The Transformation? Mark Harman looks at the history and process of translating an uncanny classic. | Lit Hub On Translation
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Jason Mott’s People Like Us, Åsne Seierstad’s The Afghans, and Elaine Castillo’s Moderation all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “Debbie used to love sunny days, but she dreaded them when she became unhoused.” The very real perils of living without shade. | Lit Hub Politics
- On poet William W. Watt’s experience witnessing the aftermath of nuclear devastation in Nagasaki. | Lit Hub History
- Álvaro Enrigue explores the history and fantasy of Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo. | Lit Hub Criticism
- What the decline in global population signals about the future of humanity: “Our times, when many people are alive, may prove to be unlike the entire rest of human history, past and future—if what is normal today persists.” | Lit Hub Science
- “Despite being two hundred thousand square kilometers in size, the Thar Desert, also known as the Great Indian Desert, has only one river: the Luni.” Read from Shobha Rao’s new novel, Indian Country. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “Disabled activists and scholars have put forward a model of ‘interdependency’ that emphasizes the reality that disabled people can and do need care from others—and holds that this is not such a bad thing.” Emily Lim Rogers considers recent books about the concept of “care.” | Public Books
- In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Arundhati Roy recounts her early life. | Vogue
- David W. Blight chronicles the far-right’s animosity towards historians and the role manipulating history plays in support of fascism. | The New Republic
- On the connection between Gabriela Mistral’s queerness and writing (and Langston Hughes as a translator of her work). | Asymptote
- Inside the US government’s pre-Trump 2.0 report on AI safety: “it was one of several AI documents from NIST that were not published for fear of clashing with the incoming administration.” | Wired
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