Lit Hub Daily: December 4, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke is born.
- Small press publishers in the UK discuss the challenge and necessity of independent publishing: “I feel a growing sense of urgency to raise awareness of the practical realities, and to be transparent about the fight for survival that many of us are facing.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Rinaldo Walcott considers Sam Cooke and power, connection and promise in Black music. | Lit Hub Music
- “There is a sense, in this biography, of him tending his own flame while attempting to urinate upon it at the same time.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Marci Vogel’s TBR includes works by Joy Harjo, Myriam Gurba, Hua Hsu, and more. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “I don’t have a southern accent. At least, I don’t have one now.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza on the sound of her grandparents‘ voices and growing up in North Carolina. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Why a library’s “most abundant resource” isn’t books, but time. | Lit Hub Libraries
- “They will be rescued. People on the mainland will become worried and someone will ready a ship!” Read from Iida Turpeinen’s novel Beasts of the Sea, translated by David Hackston. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Jackie Flynn Mogensen considers the emotional allure of the chatbot. | Mother Jones
- “Analysis, rather than encouraging Beckett to adjust to the external world as his mother had hoped, led him inward.” Nuar Alsadir explores Samuel Beckett’s relationship with his analyst, Wildred R. Bion. | The New Yorker
- “Some libraries are now intentionally using iconic Blockbuster branding to recall the hours visitors once spent looking for something to rent on Friday and Saturday nights.” Why your public library is one of the last strongholds of physical media. | 404 Media
- “The continued existence of the cinema threatens their supremacy in the desiccated cultural life of our time.” On the future of writing film criticism (or, why cinema isn’t dead). | New York Review of Books
- Lloyd Alimboyao Sy considers Jon Hickey’s novel Big Chief and the future of Native sovereignty. | Public Books
- “What I’ve learned from Dante is that complicated ideas don’t necessarily require complicated syntax; in fact, the more complicated the idea, the more useful clarity is.” Mary Jo Bang on translating Paradiso. | Los Angeles Review of Books
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