Lit Hub Weekly: March 16 - 20, 2026

• Ibram X. Kendi explains how the Great Replacement Theory made its way from rural France to the heart of American power. | Lit Hub Politics
•  Considering the genius of Frances Burney, Jane Austen’s most important literary predecessor. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My Lover, the Rabbi, explains why Gilligan’s Island taught him “how to be bumbling and small while receiving the protection of an older, bigger man.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Why the humanity of all writing (and all writers) matters more today than ever. | Lit Hub Craft
• “Having committed a genocide in Gaza, they are now unleashing hell in Iran and Lebanon.” Responses to the American-Israeli war on Iran. | Equator
• “In the Hooververse, problems are individual, never systemic, and are resolved individually.” Alexis Soloski explores the “fervid demand” to adapt Colleen Hoover’s novels. | The New York Times
• Kim Phillips-Fein considers Bernie Goetz and the enduring politics of fear. | The New Republic
• Mara Marquez Cavallaro talks to California teachers who taught their students about Palestine and paid a steep price. | The Nation
• Hapens to the best of us: A new exhibition at the Yale Library explores the literary history of typos. | Smithsonian Magazine
• Why Jacques Lacan loved Harpo Marx: “Harpo is an automatic object-machine that converts both the world and himself into a polymorphously perverse source of jouissance.” | JSTOR Daily
• Ashley Bishop considers Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe”—the Gilded Age poem that became “an ideological litmus test, depending on where you stood on capital versus labor”—and wonders who will tell the story of our current Gilded Age. | Jacobin
• Take a look inside the tiny Mystery Pier Books, the rare bookstore beloved by Hollywood heavies. | Esquire
• Traci Brimhall meets the devil: “I want to think it’s an omen, but this is the girl in me, the one who wanted to be brave enough to say Bloody Mary three times in a bathroom mirror in the dark, but just like my girl self, I don’t have the courage.” | Virginia Quarterly Review
• “By virtue of ending, the novel sucks the oxygen out of life, but it rewards me in return with something of immense significance—namely, with significance itself.” Michel Chaouli on reading to the very end. | The Yale Review
• Miaad Banki on translating through the Tehran blackout. | Public Books
• Silicon Valley’s elite have become obsessed with the concept of taste. Too bad they don’t have any! | The New Yorker
• “Sasha Dugdale on translating Maria Stepanova’s The Disappearing Act and the relationship between poetry and translating prose. | Asymptote
• “The world that came into being with the will to truth is one that seems to be unraveling before our eyes as the authority of facts and the collective value of truth lose their binding power on society.” Robert Pogue Harrison contemplates our ever-growing will to ignorance. | NYRB
• Peter Wolfendale considers the literary and philosophical history of the war between machines and human souls. | Aeon

Also on Lit Hub:

On channeling grief into other worlds • In praise of Barbara Pym • The history of anti-Asian racism and violence • Europe’s heroin crisis • Jessica Ferri on Ann Rower’s Lee And Elaine • How Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Palestinian father met her Jewish mother • Writing lessons from sports • Read “Eatonville, Florida,” a poem by Joshua Bennett • Tuck Everlasting, immortality, and the illusion of youth • The beautiful, terrible, villains of reality television • Meet Hildegard of Bingen, the German mystic who destigmatized childbirth • Haruka Iwasaki recommends celebrity/normal person romance novels • Why life’s brevity is a beautiful, human thing • Authoritarianism and the collapse of literary freedom in Russia • The similarities between art conservation and fiction writing • This week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Read “It’s a Steal,” a poem by Seema Jilani • When a scientist tackles writer’s block • Books on reproductive rights • The best reviewed books of the week • Paperbacks versus hardcovers: the eternal question • Why the poet Ed Sanders matters more than ever