Lit Hub Daily: October 17, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann dies.
- Aisling Walsh on the 30-year legacy of His Dark Materials and why Philip Pullman understands that “true evil is never about the distorted cravings of a single person.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Toni Morrison explores the intimacy and humanity in the photography of James Van Der Zee. | Lit Hub Art
- Mai Serhan searches for connection with her father and her homeland of Palestine: “I am homesick, whatever home means.” | Lit Hub Memoir
- This week on the Lit Hub Podcast: Stephen King’s archive and the Best American series! | Lit Hub Radio
- Cloud Delfina Cardona recommends books to feed your inner teenage weirdo by Michele Serros, jo reyes-boitel, Jacinto Jesús Cardona and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “Writing, it turns out, is a difficult joy.” Sue Monk Kidd on finding a flow state. | Lit Hub Craft
- Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief, Susan Orlean’s Joyride, and Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- Amber Sparks explores the art and artifice of a dollhouse’s miniature world. | Lit Hub Craft
- “The whips were gone. Extended family members saw each other for the first time in years. An unfamiliar lightness of being descended.” How those fleeing slavery found new lives in the North. | Lit Hub History
- “It was a Friday at the start of summer when Drew stopped at Ace to buy Sheetrock screws and spackling.” Read “Slant Six” from Thomas McGuane’s new story collection, A Wooded Shore. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Talia Bhatt looks at the present and future of the internet’s trans fiction writers. | The Verge
- Angelica Frey considers the Weimar Republic’s utopian operas as blueprints for better futures. | JSTOR Daily
- “While it doesn’t require a great leap of the imagination to suspect that Bellow shaped the novel to depict himself in a favorable light, for decades, it was the only version of the story that readers were likely to see.” On reevaluating Saul Bellow. | Slate
- Lilly Irani examines the intersection of border politics and the power of data. | Public Books
- Maya Lerman interviews bookseller James Webster: “There’s so much focus on the reclusive writer, but reading is also a reclusive, solitary activity. It requires you to focus on something and be alone with the words if you’re really going to do it well.” | Dirt
- In the era of AI, how do we decide what is and is not intelligence? Patrick House meditates on the question. | Los Angeles Review of Books
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