Lit Hub Daily: June 5, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 2012, Ray Bradbury dies.
- Evelyn McDonnell on the ethics of Notes to John, commercial exploitation, and the selling of Joan Didion’s privacy. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Daegan Miller considers the beauty and politics of Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive? | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Here’s a novel so pumped up and shredded it can’t possibly sit still on a shelf.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Brando Simeo Starkey on the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and the existential fight to enshrine civil rights in the Constitution. | Lit Hub Politics
- Maris Kreizman wants to know: Why are there so many new June books? | Lit Hub Craft
- Books by Mónica de la Torre, Roy Claire Potter, Ella Frears, and more are on Kate Briggs’s TBR! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Jeremy Atherton Lin on writing love and politics: “We conspired to look unflinchingly at the messy parts.” | Lit Hub Memoir
- David Rooney on John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, the fearless aviators who helmed the first (forgotten by history) non-stop trans-Atlantic flight. | Lit Hub History
- “The more I wrote, the more I realized that fear wasn’t me: fear was a parasite clinging to me for survival, a leech sucking the life from my body.” Greta Morgan recalls rediscovering creative expression after singing for the last time. | Lit Hub Music
- “I was right. Janine had been right. Emma was right.” Read from Yrsa Daley-Ward’s new novel, The Catch. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “Isn’t it possible that dispatching a 21st-century writer to Paris to tramp along in Twain’s wake might enhance the modern reader’s appreciation of Twain’s work by proxy? It’s certainly not impossible.” Caity Weaver attempts to follow in Mark Twain’s (Parisian) footsteps. | The Atlantic
- Michael Bobelian considers the renewed relevance of Arthur Derounian’s best-selling 1943 exposé of the United States’ Nazi underworld, Under Cover, which “served as a wake-up call for his contemporaries and a permanent record of the reactionary forces lurking just beneath the surface of the world’s oldest democracy.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Colm Tóibín, Alan Hollinghurst, Olivia Liang and more remember Edmund White. | The Guardian
- Madeleine Watts revisits the hypnotic nature of Antigone Kelefa’s The Island. | The Nation
- “Truly radical political theories are born from the lived experience of humans and only systematized by philosophers later.” Ed Simon resurrects the memory of Masaniello, the man behind the Neapolitan Revolt of 1647. | The Baffler
- Darren Roso examines Karl Korsch’s contributions to Marxist theory. | Jacobin
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