Lit Hub Daily: June 20, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1903, Jack London’s novel The Call of the Wild begins serialization in the Saturday Evening Post.
- Kamila Shamsie gives a close and highly critical reading of English PEN’s charter. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Remember to rest.” In which Maris Kreizman attempts to heed her own advice about publishing a book and going on a book tour. | Lit Hub Advice
- Kirsty McHugh and Ian Scott explore how Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and more chose their pen names. | Lit Hub Biography
- Catherine Lacey’s TBR includes books by Jen Calleja, Tezer Özlü, and Georgi Gospodinov! | Lit Hub Criticism
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“While reading Next to Heaven, I sometimes thought I could feel individual cells in my body trying to die.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Siouxzi Connor recommends Sapphic books that explore hydrofeminism by Dylin Hardcastle, Julia Armfield, Sophie Mackintosh, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- How Edna Lewis became a queer icon of Southern cooking. | Lit Hub Food
- Radha Vatsal remembers the literary legacy of her great-great grandfather, Nandshankar Mehta, and traces the forgotten history of South Asian cosmopolitanism. | Lit Hub History
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Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book, Michelle Huneven’s Bug Hollow, and Jan Gradvall’s The Story of ABBA all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- Jane Smiley and Susan Swan discuss the importance of women who take up space: “Being unusually tall makes you feel set apart because mostly everybody else sees someone with the same weight, height and coloring every day.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “Upstairs, I paused at my bedroom door, hearing Rick’s delicate, papery snore, and walked down the hall, pushing open the door to Alex’s room.” Read from Jayson Greene’s new novel, UnWorld. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “Few have cared so deeply for the poor or taken the quest to both know and live out truth more seriously.” Ben Woollard on Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism. | JSTOR Daily
- “If we value the medicine the land offers us so generously, we must become medicine for the land.” Robin Wall Kimmerer explores the precious forest pharmacy of the Adirondacks. | Orion
- “Brian’s genius was bound up in his fixation on these paradoxes: the absence that haunts every presence; the love that’s most vital just before it drains away; pain and beauty too enmeshed to be pulled apart.” Charlotte Shane on Ben Greenman’s I Am Brian Wilson and the late musician’s legacy. | n+1
- Sophie Gonick considers the construction of migrant spaces in New York. | Public Books
- “Italian rhythm is obviously different from that of English, but it has a pronounced physiognomy: this aspect allowed the translator to hear it naturally and render it instinctively into its linguistic twin.” On poetry in translation between English and Italian. | Asymptote
- Authors are taking to TikTok to prove they aren’t using generative AI. | Wired
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