Lit Hub Daily: December 9, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1595, Shakespeare’s Richard II is possibly acted at a private performance at the Canon Row house of Sir Edward Hoby.
- “‘But you can’t take him in,’ I heard myself saying suddenly, ‘He didn’t do anything.” Why Joan Didion hated the police. | Lit Hub Criticism
- One thing about us is that we’re never not reading. Here are 29 old books we read and loved in 2025. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Colm Tóibín looks back on the creative process behind A Long Winter. | Lit Hub Craft
- Why To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s unacknowledged plague novel. | Lit Hub Criticism
- The 11 new books out today include titles by Adam Morgan, John Berryman, Tilar J. Mazzeo, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Susannah Fullerton considers Colette’s many feline muses. | Lit Hub Biography
- On Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s Berlin Shuffle, “a testament both to a remarkable talent and to a turbulent time—a message in a bottle finally retrieved, and startlingly relevant.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Elizabeth McCracken, Nadia Davids, Tarpley Hitt and more authors take the Lit Hub questionnaire. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “Walter Schreiber was a good-natured man. His entire being radiated affability and understanding.” Read from Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s Berlin Shuffle, translated by Philip Boehm. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “[A]gain and again, his psychic conflicts were displaced onto the lives of his patients.” Rachel Aviv explores Oliver Sacks’ approach to telling his patients’ stories—and his own. | The New Yorker
- Robin Myers gravitates toward the idea of “translator as eternal guest.” | Words Without Borders
- Alysia Abbott on honoring her dad through teaching AIDS literature. | WBUR
- Author and translator Polly Barton on translation as an act of trust and intimacy. | 3:AM
- “All my crystals have lined up and saluted to the authority of pressure like battalions of toy soldiers standing in perfect rows and columns, obeying the spreadsheet. War footing on the proving ground.” On the poetics of geology. | Orion
- Miya Ando explores the many Japanese words for rain and how they translate into English. | The MIT Press Reader
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