Lit Hub Weekly: January 5 - 9, 2026

• Not sure what to look forward to in 2026? Maybe consider the 314 books we’re most anticipating this year. | Lit Hub
• Elspeth Wilson on the joys of becoming a literary omnivore.  | Lit Hub Criticism
• Chris Duffy explains why humor is an effective means of speaking truth to power. | Lit Hub Humor
• How François Mackandal and the enslaved of Saint-Domingue struck fear into the hearts of the ruling class. | Lit Hub History
• What are besties for? On the medieval women writers who challenged ideas of friendship. | JSTOR Daily
• On the rise of a new golden age of lesbian pulp fiction: “The lesbian seems to have been toppled, at least for now, off the pedestal of political purity to which the pop-feminist sex politics of the 2010s assigned her.” | The Baffler
• How Susan Sontag became an icon of both academia and pop culture. | The MIT Press Reader
• How actress Joan Lowell (and her memoir) pioneered the art of literary fraud. | The New Yorker
• Ryan Zickgraf decries the unsexy vampirism of Silicon Valley. | Jacobin
• “By now, we’ve all seen the baroque flow-charts of reciprocal investments between the big AI players, a Gordian knot of equity stakes and suppliers becoming customers.” Why higher ed is adapting AI. | Defector
• The life and times of “Bilitis”: How a literary hoax burnished Sappho’s legacy. | Aeon
• Saumya Roy reports on San Francisco’s housing crisis: “Watching these cases, I began to understand that homelessness in the United States was at least as much about isolation as it was about material deprivation.” | The Dial
• Lara Williams meditates on the modern state of cringe. | Dirt
• How one unorthodox Penn professor is getting his students to set down the phones and read again. | Vulture
• Frank M. Young chronicles the rise and fall of newspaper comics. | The Comics Journal
• Hank Kennedy considers how anti-communist comic books helped spread the Red Scare. | Current Affairs
• “The United States’ newspaper of record has not yet found it necessary to replace Friedman with someone who makes sense on a regular basis.” Belén Fernández looks back on thirty years of Thomas Friedman. | The Baffler
• David Owen explores how—and why—the American education system neglects methods proven to help dyslexic students read. | The New Yorker
• Hanif Abdurraqib listens to Phyllis Hyman’s posthumous 1995 album, I Refuse to Be Lonely. | Longreads

Also on Lit Hub:

Members of the literary community we lost in 2025 • On the cycle of life, death, and birding • Read a poem by Patricia Spears Jones • Jonathan Lethem and Ben Markovits on trans-Atlantic literary life • Amit Chaudhuri tells us about writing longhand • The 17 new books out this week • Mixing myth and reality to bring the Queen of Sheba to life • How a collaboration with Virginia Faulkner produced Polly Adler’s A House is Not a Home • The rise and fall of Benito Mussolini •  The history and science of alcohol • Two new books that demystify the publishing industry • On motherhood, watching Bosch, and letting yourself give up •  5 book reviews you need to read this week • The destruction wrought by the Eaton Canyon and Palisades Fires • Our changing attitudes towards urban wildlife • “I playfully call myself an echodeviant as a way of reclaiming mishearing.” • The best reviewed books of the week • On being a teen soldier in the Revolutionary War • Five steps for developing a better writing practice • What happens if Russia wins in Ukraine?