Lit Hub Weekly: July 20 - 24, 2026

• “Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.” Rebecca Solnit on the Odyssey and the Western literary tradition of silencing women. | Lit Hub Criticism
• From Dr. Abdul El-Sayed to Brad Lander, Steven W. Thrasher examines the emerging Democratic coalition united by criticism of Israel. | Lit Hub Politics
• Why writing alt text image descriptions is an act of literary translation. | Lit Hub Technology
• April Dávila explores the neuroscience of writer’s block (and what we can do to conquer it). | Lit Hub Craft
• Richard Fallon considers Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland, and the literary canon of lost worlds. | Public Domain Review
• What is the value of standardized testing in the age of AI? | Slate
• “The most interesting thing about How Soccer Explains the World is the tension between being a travelogue and an airport book.” Alex Shephard revisits Franklin Foer’s bestselling 2004 book. | The New Republic
• A fresh coat of paint for The Odyssey: MJ Franklin considers the marketing of a 3,000-year-old epic. | The New York Times
• “Asimov provided us with no keys for encountering machines because the encounter is not a problem we cleanly inhabit and then just as cleanly delete.” Nina Beguš and Nicole Oliva on Asimov and AI. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Ed Simon explores Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, often considered the first American Gothic novel. | The Paris Review
• “What to do with a still-living creative impulse at life’s end, even when it feels like there’s nothing left to say?” David Schurman Wallace considers Fanny Howe’s posthumous This Poor Book. | Poetry
• Bookseller Ana Bell talks about her brother Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for moving a box of zines: “If you were going to tell me that the contents of the box, the zines, the stickers, the poetry, that’s the crime—then we have a bigger problem here, which is free speech.” | The New Republic
• While America is experiencing a literacy crisis, Jefferson County, Mississippi educators are doing something right. | Wired
• Carey Baraka revisits The Gods Must Be Crazy, the most successful African movie ever made. | Equator
• Emily Laskin translates two pieces from Russian: one by Lesya Lapina on the homophobia of Putin’s Center for Combating Extremism, the other by Sergey Hyugge on “an older, more chill version of the internet.” | The Dial
• Oscar Duffield looks at recent English translations of two eighteenth century epic poems originally composed in Gaelic. | Asymptote
• “The play, he insisted, strove to avoid definition. This strategy of avoidance leaves us to gaze at a landscape void of meaning, one that by turns is the source of our bemusement and amusement.” Robert Zaretsky on Waiting for Godot. | The American Scholar
• “I did love New York, but I love New York more now after writing about it for seven years in this certain kind of way.” Natalie Weiner interviews Colson Whitehead. | Defector
• What does a Homerist think of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey? | Hyperallergic

Also on Lit Hub:

Why more retellings of the Odyssey should center women • Experiencing your family’s homeland amid grief • What makes a literary biography literary? • How leprosy was wielded as a bio-weapon against indigenous Hawaiians • What our attitudes towards aging reveal about ourselves • This week in literary history, O. Henry is released from prison • The necessity of preserving Native cuisines • How Jean-Paul Sartre embraced Marxism • If you need to kick-start your writing, try reading a little romance • Claire Vaye Watkins on writing the Mojave Desert • How writers of the Harlem Renaissance examined disability and medical racism • Meet medieval Italy’s traveling booksellers • Read “The Romantics,” a poem by Maya C. Popa • Kōhei Saitō examines the relationship between capitalism and climate change • Should an author narrate their own audiobook, or should an actor? • A conversation on censorship, porn, capitalism, and art • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Historians who remind us not to repeat humanity’s mistakes • Victoria Chang’s TBR • This week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • Sylvia Plath’s relationship to her tarot deck • Book cover design in the social media era • Making peace with the scale of your work • The queer poetics of Cris Judar’s They Marched Under the Sun • The best reviewed books of the week • Read “Drinking the Bees,” a poem by Christian Wiman