Lit Hub Weekly: December 1 - 5, 2025

• If you love a small press, check out these 100 notable small press books from 2025. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “Soon it won’t just be birthday greetings and opening gambits on Hinge that people outsource to AI.” Matt Greene explains why LLMs are built for a post-meaning world. | Lit Hub Craft
• Laura Kraftowitz considers Bari Weiss, liberal Zionism, and viewpoints across generations: “So that even when my childhood congregation fails to apply its own values when it comes to genocide, I always will.” | Lit Hub Memoir
• Round out your end of the year book recommendations with 43 new books our staff loved in 2025. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “We should not give our children, whose brains are vulnerable and malleable, books created by computers. We shouldn’t give them books created carelessly.” Lily Meyer considers the menace of AI children’s books. | Mother Jones
• Rebecca Cokley pays tribute to Alice Wong: “It was part of Alice’s ability to look to the future and a world where laws and attitudes did not keep disabled people poor, pitied, and isolated.” | The Nation
• Alex Dueben looks back on Starman, a comic of “the old, weird America.” | The Comics Journal
• “A sense of humor is quite an intelligent way of processing the world, and it’s easy for people to dismiss that if they don’t have one.” Rosa Lyster catches up with (the very funny) Helen Fielding. | The Paris Review
• Jake Offenhartz spends a day with Mahmood Mamdani, the author of 12 books and, more recently, father of New York City’s mayor elect. | The New Yorker
• “I could throw this baked potato at this guy’s head right now, I sat there thinking. It would hit him right in the face.” Mike Nagel explores not being famous. | Dirt
• In defense of Olivia Nuzzi (sort of): “American Canto is a sad and bizarrely told story about a motherless girl who technically did have a mother well into adulthood, and a daddy’s girl whose sanitation worker father did his best but could not protect her from her abusive, alcoholic mother.” | The Nation
• Jessi Jezewska Stevens considers how recent novels about AI reflect our understanding of the technology—and our humanity. | The Dial
• “The question mark has a bad reputation. It’s unruly, a rebel feeding on chaos.” Grace Byron explores the issue of questions in Evangelical Christianity. | Granta
• “Analysis, rather than encouraging Beckett to adjust to the external world as his mother had hoped, led him inward.” Nuar Alsadir explores Samuel Beckett’s relationship with his analyst, Wildred R. Bion. | The New Yorker
• “Some libraries are now intentionally using iconic Blockbuster branding to recall the hours visitors once spent looking for something to rent on Friday and Saturday nights.” Why your public library is one of the last strongholds of physical media. | 404 Media
• “What I’ve learned from Dante is that complicated ideas don’t necessarily require complicated syntax; in fact, the more complicated the idea, the more useful clarity is.” Mary Jo Bang on translating Paradiso. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “What makes some countries seem like myths and others not? What makes a child, growing up in Gaza, unable to comprehend that America is real?” Muhammad al-Zaqzouq on looking at America from Gaza (translated by Katherine Hall). | The Dial
• Jake Pitre looks into the futurism of the past. | JSTOR Daily
• Erin Evans examines the complicated literature of eating disorders. | Full Stop

Also on Lit Hub:

10 great children’s books you might have missed in 2025 • The rise of capitalism as an economic system and way of life • Christopher Spaide recommends new poetry collections • The enduring legacy of comedian Sid Caesar • The best sci-fi and fantasy books coming in December • Sarah Aziza on Gaza, genocide, and the graveyard of meanings • The best audiobooks of 2025 • Jane Ciabattari talks to debut author Lauren Rothery • Tareq Baconi on the repeated exile of his Palestinian refugee family • Grief, translation, and Fátima Vélez’s Galápagos • Playing piano under big West Texas skies • Little ways to cultivate your reading (and writing) life •  Read “they descend upon us,” a poem by Selma Asotić • The challenge and necessity of independent publishing • On Sam Cooke and power, connection and promise in Black music • Am I the asshole if my friends won’t let me in their writers’ group? • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Marci Vogel’s TBR • Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza on the sound of her grandparents‘ voices • A library’s “most abundant resource” • What can watching Survivor teach you about writing? • How West African communities fought the European slave trade • The best reviewed books of the week • The best reviewed books of the week • Chilling tales of folk horror in translation • Africa and the plurality of African literature • On 1776, the pivotal year for what would become America