Lit Hub Weekly: June 15 - 19, 2026

• Emily Temple reads every summer reading list (so you don’t have to). | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Why Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee” is a good poem for bad dads. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Through layers of loss and sorrow, Fatemeh Shams remembers Marjane Satrapi: “Marjane reminded me, as her work often does, that in the bleakest times, art, writing, and human connection are radical acts of repair.” | Lit Hub
• How a family’s history of struggle and survival in Jamaica reveals centuries of Black exclusion in healthcare. | Lit Hub Health
• Jessica Winter explores why critiquing children’s literature misses the larger point: “Librarians and educators stress that what’s more important than matters of taste is keeping kids conditioned to reading at a crucial developmental moment.” | The New Yorker
• Chris Mautner shares an interview with Marjane Satrapi from 2006. | The Comics Journal
• In the age of increasing AI ubiquity, Dan Chiasson makes the case for the necessity of the impasse in the writing process. | NYRB
• “The whole lesbian world was around poets.” Lakshmi Rivera Amin interviews Sarah Schulman. | Hyperallergic
• Amy Goodman talks to John Nichols about the purpose of journalism and threats to freedom of the press. | The Nation
• A literary and philosophical look at being a garbage collector. | Harper’s
• Xia Jia on writing and the limits of both human and artificial intelligence. | The MIT Press Reader
• Caleb Brennan explores the fascist internet nihilism of groyper politics. | The Baffler
• Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera on exile, Edward Said, and “the scars of ‘Americanization.’” ​| Public Books
• “Children are our smallest comrades — they live within our victories and failures.” Hal Schrieve surveys children’s literature from a socialist perspective. | Lux
• Patricia Lockwood wants to know what’s going on with American Catholicism. | London Review of Books
• Virginia McGee Richards remembers the enslaved South Carolinians who rowed to freedom along the Lowcountry’s Inner Passage. | The MIT Press Reader

Also on Lit Hub:

How squids have sex • Pain, loneliness, and the 100th anniversary of Virgina Woolf’s “On Being Ill” • Books about cats and their owners • Phill Branch navigates Blackness through film and print • Cooking, family, and queer domesticity • This week in literary history, Dante Alighieri is named prior of Florence • The problem with American patriotism • How working in advertising helped Lu Chekowski write a memoir • Books about the United States (by non-American authors) • Heteropessimism? Try Heterofatalism • If you want to be an astronaut, you need to nail the interview • Contextualizing giving birth through the history of midwifery • On finding inspiration in someone else’s nuptials • Anti-apartheid resistance in 1970s South Africa • Greg Sarris on telling the stories of California’s indigenous communities • The future of ethnic studies when academia’s in crisis • Navigating American racism as a child with a famous father • Redeeming Freud through fiction • A post office that handles letters for the dead • What even the most vanilla among us can learn from BDSM • The military and corporate forces that developed GPS • The ethics of adapting to progressive blindness • On artificial light and insomnia • Why every novel is a climate change novel • The necessity of writing speculative fiction • The surreal passage of time in suburban America • 5 reviews you need to read this week • Namwali Serpell and Angela Flournoy discuss Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby • This week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • The best reviewed books of the week • Is care the solution to ending American gerontocracy? • Is your friend the asshole for name-dropping all the cool, famous authors she hangs with? • Understanding an absent father through fiction • How to write a novel in 33 days