Lit Hub Weekly: August 4 - 8, 2025

• Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland gets a 21st century reassessment: “…the plot is set in motion by Reagan’s slashing of the federal government, unwittingly severing millions of connections, setting in motion events beyond anyone’s control, resurrecting the suppressed.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• How linguistic archeologists link humanity through the shared origins of modern languages: “I find all this oddly comforting, the way these connections reveal how others before us have puzzled over their own experiences and tried their best to make sense of them.”  | Lit Hub History
• Aaron Boehmer examines the hope in human connection and Octavia Butler’s “speech sounds.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• Elizabeth Cook examines the futures of small presses after the federal government’s “uncertainty, disrespect, and bullying” around NEA grants. | Lit Hub Politics
• Jon Allsop looks into the potential for corruption inherent in Presidential libraries. | The New Yorker
• “Hans Christian Andersen possessed a certain genius — not merely in the fecundity of his lurid imaginings, but in his talent for identifying a child’s primal terrors.” Sadie Stein’s love-hate relationship with the writer of “The Little Match Girl.” | The New York Times  
• Betsy Golden Kellem explores the bizarre history of the Automaton Chess Player. | JSTOR Daily
• Riley MacLeod reads Moby-Dick on a boat (over a single day). | Aftermath
• Nicholas Boggs on writing James Baldwin’s life as a love story. | Vogue
• “Do put all your eggs in a single basket if it is the most sublime basket you have ever seen, perfectly molded to the form of your eggs, I mean books.” Award-winning translator Lara Vergnaud offers some advice for pitching translations in a bleak market. | Words Without Borders
• “We can hardly make sense of the idea of the end of the world without attending to all the other worlds that ended before our own.” Roy Scranton considers life in a perpetual apocalypse. | The Baffler
• Niela Orr profiles Jamaica Kincaid, self-described “amateur writer.” | The New York Times Magazine
• Tao Lin shares parts of his college diary. | The Paris Review
• Sasha Abamsky explores the reality of Kafka’s America. | The Nation
• Patricia Lockwood writes about The X-Files, her father, and whether or not we “live in a describable time.” | London Review of Books
• Another consequence of AI? America going nuclear. | The Verge
• “Disabled activists and scholars have put forward a model of ‘interdependency’ that emphasizes the reality that disabled people can and do need care from others—and holds that this is not such a bad thing.” Emily Lim Rogers considers recent books about the concept of “care.” | Public Books
• David W. Blight chronicles the far-right’s animosity towards historians and the role manipulating history plays in support of fascism. | The New Republic
• Inside the US government’s pre-Trump 2.0 report on AI safety: “it was one of several AI documents from NIST that were not published for fear of clashing with the incoming administration.” | Wired

Also on Lit Hub:

Building a fictional world around Korean language and culture • Jon Raymond recommends books about sex and God • How Igbo folklore teaches that “all literature must be translated.”  •  Five essential books on Black queer friendship •  Why writers write about writers • Writing poetry aboard a naval destroyer • What Jane Austen’s most mundane possessions reveal • Nell Stevens on a 19th-century scandal • How The Whale Rider introduced Māori culture to the world. • Mining the fascinating lore of art history to write • Read “Reading,” a poem by Emily Skillings • A modern take on Palestinian couscous fritters • Books for lovers of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive • The horror and aftermath of the 1985 Georgia Church Murders • Read “Black History Minute,” a poem by Harryette Mullen • How colonists legislated the first slaves in America into existence • Am I the literary asshole? • Ella Berman on writing about the City of Angels • Chloe Caldwell’s TBR • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Daily life in Nagasaki before the atomic bomb • This week on The Lit Hub Podcast • On writing a New York novel while no longer living in New York • Should we call it The Metamorphosis or The Transformation? • The best reviewed books of the week • The very real perils of living without shade • When William W. Watt witnessed the aftermath of nuclear devastation • The history and fantasy of Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo • What the decline in global population signals