Lit Hub Daily: November 20, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
- “Each of these cultural moments, be it Swift’s protection of family values, Sweeney’s promotion of eugenics, or DiCaprio’s contributions to eco-imperialism, serve to reinforce the same ideological architecture that McCarthyism once codified through law and propaganda.” On the new Red Scare. | Lit Hub Politics
- Vanessa Chang examines intimacy in the age of chatbots: “If the myth of Pygmalion imagines love perfected, distilled from the body, digital platforms deploy that ideal as a design principle.” | Lit Hub Technology
- In which Maris Kreizman encounters MAHA anti-vaxxers the Texas Book Festival (and explains why books are the perfect medium for grifters to make themselves heard). | Lit Hub Politics
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“Hers is a fiction of the absurd, born of a woozy America that doesn’t know how to move forward.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Lola Lafon on the fine line between veneration and exploitation and spending the night in the annex of the Anne Frank House. | Lit Hub Biography
- Kristin Collier explores the all-encompassing toll of debt and economic precarity in America. | Lit Hub Politics
- Lily Meyer talks to Madeleine Arenivar, translator of Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s debut novel Carnaval Fever, about preserving poetic language and letting a book shine. | Lit Hub On Translation
- “Sometimes, things are so clear in your mind that you remember everything: images, parts of strangers’ faces, empty rooms, sounds and words, someone’s voice.” Read from Marek Torčík’s novel Memory Burn, translated by Graeme Dibble and Suzanne Dibble. | Lit Hub Fiction
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“It’s as much an account of the writer’s and reader’s education as it is that of the protagonist.” Susan Bernofsky revisits Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. | The Nation
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Chateaubriand writes of the “worthlessness” that followed Napoleon’s reign. | The Paris Review
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Henry Luzzatto chronicles the rise and fall (and rise again) of far-right separatist movements. | The Baffler
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“Like most others in the group, she didn’t set out to find an AI boyfriend.” On the limits of technology and the splintering of an AI boyfriend subreddit. | The Cut
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Zephyr Teachout mines recent books for answers about why multilevel marketing schemes continue to thrive. | New York Review of Books
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Kelly Burke dissects an AI publishing scam targeting authors in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. | The Guardian
