Lit Hub Daily: March 12, 2026

What Was Lost: A Queer Accounting of the New York Times Book Review, 2013-2022
13 essential books by trans and queer writers, reviewed by trans and queer writers.

 Calvin Gimpelevich on Casey Plett’s Dream of a Woman • Emory Oakley on Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars • Julie Kliegman on Frankie de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D’Arcangelo’s Hail Mary • Alexander Chee on Lio Ming’s Beating Heart Baby • Bianca Licitra on Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE • Harron Walker Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt • Nico Mara-McKay on Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer • Calvin Kasulke on T Cooper’s Real Man Adventures • Denne Michele Norris on Imogen Binnie’s Nevada • Sage Agee on Jackie Ess’s Darryl • Meredith Talusan on Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit • Costa Beavin Pappas on Vivek Shraya’s I’m Afraid of Men

• “The tired-looking smiley face under the dust jacket says as much as the 400-plus over-polished pages inside.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week | Book Marks
• Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction. | Lit Hub Bookstores
• “Nur Mahdi al-Shahdi wasn’t born just once, but several times throughout the years of his life in the alleys.” Read from Bassem Khandaqji’s novel A Mask the Color of the Sky, translated by Addie Leak. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Your senators might be using generative AI for “drafting and editing documents, summarizing information, preparing talking points and briefing material, and conducting research and analysis.” What could possibly go wrong? | 404 Media
• The creator of Wordle wants to bring cryptic crosswords to the masses. | The New Yorker
• “Gout is a master translator. She compensates constantly, balancing the system with ruthless internal logic. She takes what the body offers — last week’s wine, last year’s weight gain, yesterday’s skipped meds — and translates it into her own idiom.” Jan Steyn considers the literary lessons of gout. | The Dial
• “The only poems (assuming we agree that they are poems) that the narrator quotes directly are those quickly disintegrating lines that Wieder—a member of Pinochet’s air force—writes with his plane across the sky.” Ben Lerner on Bolaño’s Distant Star. | The Paris Review
• Joanna Biggs surveys Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. | London Review of Books
• “If Kendi is right that detractors magnify his shortcomings to discredit his scholarship, the biggest test will be his new book, which seems destined to be judged less by its content than by Kendi’s own baggage.” Zak Cheney-Rice profiles Ibram X. Kendi. | New York Magazine