Lit Hub Weekly: December 8 - 12, 2025

• These are the best book covers of 2025 (as chosen by some of the industry’s best cover designers). | Lit Hub Design
• Why To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s unacknowledged plague novel. | Lit Hub Health
• What happens when Gen Z encounters Catullus’s filthiest poem? “Reading wakes us up to love, culture, grief, war, a range of possibilities too vast to name, and also to great discomfort.” | Lit Hub Craft
• Adrian McKinty considers the “epistemological uncertainty” of Thomas Pynchon’s detective fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Has “working-class writing” gone the way of the dodo bird? Jake Trelease on the need for literature beyond the bourgeoisie. | Tribune
• “I think poetry is a positive outcome of friendship. I’d call that a fact.” Eileen Myles reflects on writing their previously unpublished poem, “Bird Watching.” | The Paris Review
• How community libraries make archival and literary resources accessible as attacks on knowledge escalate. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “[A]gain and again, his psychic conflicts were displaced onto the lives of his patients.” Rachel Aviv explores Oliver Sacks’ approach to telling his patients’ stories—and his own. | The New Yorker
• “All my crystals have lined up and saluted to the authority of pressure like battalions of toy soldiers standing in perfect rows and columns, obeying the spreadsheet. War footing Robin Myers gravitates toward the idea of “translator as eternal guest.” | Words Without Borders
• Book designer Alison Forner discusses the process of creating the cover for American Canto. | Fast Company
• “The heart swells just thinking about a genuine literary ‘PHENOMENON’ occurring in a country whose days of mass literacy may be behind it.” Daniel Yadin on romantasy at the end of the world. | The Drift
• Jay Caspian Kang meditates on what the internet has done to reading. | The New Yorker
• “Balle treats her speculative framework like a petri dish wherein she can experiment with new lines of inquiry in clipped, plain language.” Conor Truax considers Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. | The Baffler
• Why science fiction literature needs to let readers into the lab. | Public Books
• Nissa Parmar examines the political power of poetry. | JSTOR Daily
• Horst Bredekamp explores the artistic lineage that informed Frank Gehry’s sketches. | The MIT Press Reader
• “Every time I have to write about Rome for some publication abroad, I feel like I’m either selling out parts of the city or snitching on friends to foreign secret services.” Francesco Pacifico on the scourge of American tourists. | The Dial
• Larissa Diakiw on what humans can learn about ourselves from bats. | Hazlitt

Also on Lit Hub:

On A.A. Milne’s romance novels • Celebrating African visual storytelling • How Germany’s turbulent 20th century impacted a grandmother’s life • Is Brendan Mac Evilly a better novelist or ceramist • Read “Le Chien,” a poem by Billy Collins • Read two poems from Devon Walker-Figueroa’s new collection • Why Joan Didion hated the police • 29 old books we read and loved in 2025 • Colm Tóibín looks on the process behind A Long Winter • Colette’s many feline muses • On Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s Berlin Shuffle • Authors take the Lit Hub questionnaire • Why novelists should gamble on themselves • Marion Winik reflects on her 1994 memoir, First Comes Love • Disordered eating, therapy culture, and the expectations of motherhood • Nadia Davids spends time with the ghosts of Apartheid • The similarities between writing trash bashing • Did Jane Austen invent the wellness guy? • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Emily Dickinson’s letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson • Zefyr Lisowski’s TBR • The poetry and resistance of Nadia Anjuman • Peter Mishler interviews poet Maurice Riordan • Black liberation, the abolition of slavery, and the myth of progress • Haruka Iwasaki recommends holiday romance novels • Writers share the most surprising parts of their creative routines • How Sam Shepard became New York’s star counterculture playwright