Lit Hub Weekly: July 21 - 25, 2025

• “The terror of ICE has pushed immigrant families in Ventura County to their deaths in ways fast and slow.” Steven W. Thrasher on what these brutal raids signal for the future. | Lit Hub Politics
• “Magic and ideology are both practices of belief.” On the cluttered bird’s nest of Leonora Carrington’s The Stone Door. | Lit Hub Criticism 
• What if Charlie Brown were a socialist? On the past and future of Malfada, Argentina’s iconic comic strip. | Lit Hub Art
• From Dickens to Dean Koontz, Ed Simon explores prolific authors, their habits, and the persistent need to produce. | Lit Hub Craft
• Lincoln Michel dives into the latest anemic “state of the novel” discourse. | Counter Craft
• Rachel Kushner shares some of the books on the syllabus of her Stanford creative writing class. | The New Yorker  
• Jamieson Webster meditates on dreams, ashes,  and the structure of sacrifice. | The Paris Review
• “Yet perhaps what is more intriguing is which lines the post-apocalyptic genre have not crossed.” Isaac Yuen looks at literature and film of the post-post apocalypse. | Public Books
• Maya C. Popa explores the life and career of Laura Gilpin, the poet best remembered as the author of “The Two-headed Calf.” | Poetry
• “The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel’s structure.” Joshua Cohen and Vladimir Sorokin in conversation. | The Paris Review
• Helen Chazan asks, what makes a comic transgressive? | The Comics Journal
• “This is what the rivers told me: that life is always and utterly lived in flow and in relation.” Robert Macfarlane and Terry Tempest Williams in conversation. | Orion
• Lola Seaton on Sheila Heti and the illusion of effortlessness. | New York Review of Books
• “My book only briefly mentions Gaza’s parents and kids, and it triggers protests.” Aymann Ismail on what happened when pro-Israel protestors came to his reading. | Slate
• Jonathon Atkinson remembers the “inarticulability” of Lyn Hejinian through her book-length poem, Fall Creek. | n+1
• Alexandra Billet considers the gutting of public broadcasting, and the necessity of “creative and informational spaces […] shielded from the influence of commerce.” | Jacobin 
• “Technosolutionist approaches to disability as something that can be eradicated through technological innovation exacerbate existing forms of erasure by promising a future without disabled people.” Anya Heise-Von Der Lippe on disability erasure and technoablism. | Public Books
• Rami Abu Jamous details the death of Obeida, one of hundreds of Palestinians murdered while waiting for aid distribution to feed his family. | The Nation 
• “In the shadow of rhetorical warfare and actual persecution, trans writing about sex has acquired a curiously contradictory character.” Emily Zhou explores memoirs of trans women’s sexualities. | Defector

Also on Lit Hub: 

Neko Case praises Sinéad O’Connor’s catalogue  • On healing climate grief through ritual and reverence • Writing about the aftermath of suicide in memoir • Impact of ethanol production and how big agriculture misled the public • Novels set in imaginary (but realistic) locales • This week’s new books • Ivonne Lamazares on family, identity, and Cuba • Why glacial ice isn’t just a product of climate • On New York’s first great architectural firm • The historical erasure of Jewish working-class anti-Zionism • Why indie booksellers are more essential than ever • Melody Glenn takes an expansive lens to the opioid epidemic • How democracy took the hit in a struggle against algorithms • The literary landscape of religious conversion • How fate, circumstance, and privilege influence how we live • Gaza, genocide, and the responsibility of a narrator • Am I the literary asshole if… • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • How a family mystery intersects with genocide against Canada’s First Nations • Inside the final moments before the bombing of Hiroshima • What pranking the Lit Hub staff taught Katie Yee about writing • Why distinctions between expats, economic migrants, and refugees shouldn’t matter •​ The best reviewed books of the week • Books that explore the myths of sirens • On the power of hybrid writing