Lit Hub Weekly: March 23 - 27, 2026

• Stephanie Gorton talks to William Kennedy, legendary author of Ironweed, about turning a bedtime story for his four-year-old into Charlie Malarkey and the Belly-button Machine. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• “People often believe that we can understand things simply by categorizing them, and that bothers me.” Leanne Ogasawara in conversation with Mieko Kawakami and her translators, Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio. | Lit Hub On Translation 
• Langston Hughes, translator? Ricardo Wilson II explores the writer’s experience in Mexico and his struggle to bring Mexican and Cuban writers to American audiences. | Lit Hub Biography
• Meet the Habsburgs! And watch as their daughters marry their way across 18th-century Europe! | Lit Hub History
• On the (mis)diagnosis of Franz Kafka: “Many psychoanalytically informed critics (though not all) have judged Kafka to be a writer of schizophrenia.” | The Paris Review
• What the scandal surrounding Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl signals about publishing and generative AI. | The New York Times
• “Bitch is a linguistic chameleon: there are good bitches and bad bitches; boss bitches and perfect bitches; sexy, difficult, dangerous or even psycho bitches.” How language evolves alongside changing ideas about gender and power. | Aeon
• Paul Elie considers the unique threats facing non-fiction book publishing. Here’s why the genre is more important than ever. | The New Republic
• Got Lux? Meet the socialist feminist magazine that’s reclaiming the “Charlie Kirk style campus tour.” | The Guardian
• Joshua Rothman wonders why it’s so difficult to “follow our inspired impulses all the way to the end.”| The New Yorker
• Nilay Patel talks to Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman (formerly known as Grammarly—of “Expert Review” infamy) about AI and the age of extraction. | The Verge
• What happens when a book is franchised? J.W. McCormack on the perils of the “continuation novel.” | The Baffler
• Victoria Baena on what every adapter gets wrong about the violence in Wuthering Heights. | The Nation
• “Institutions, by design, seek to flatten us.” On autism, institutions, and the cost of thriving. | Dirt
• A fun new side effect of mass AI adoption: some people (including, disproportionately, non-native English speakers) are being falsely accused of using it to write. | New York Magazine
• “Is life worth living? Yes—I have more Laxness to read.” On the rich oeuvre of Halldór Laxness. | Asymptote
• Ariella Garmaise digs into the controversy surrounding Nan Goldin’s Stendhal Syndrome. | The Walrus
• Revisiting the story of the Toulagoo Nine, a group of Black college students arrested for protesting the segregation of public spaces (by reading at the library). | Smithsonian Magazine
• “I wanted to do something with my hands, something real, tangible, and material. Pleasure and mastery.” Peter Wayne Moe on finding a small way to resist AI. | Longreads

Also on Lit Hub:

On Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and salt lakes • A modern political history of American science and healthcare • How The Secret Garden inspired love for British literature • This week in literary history • Cecile Pin recommends astronaut books • Why we stigmatize people who reject technology • The political and philosophical ramifications of Israel’s genocide • The origins of the Nazi party in the United States • Pet portraiture, “inherently a form of entanglement” •  NYU has put an end to live student graduation speeches • The French botanist who changed biology on a bet • On translating Anna Nerkagi’s White Moss • Why we still need book festivals • Peasant society at the dawn of European capitalism • The evolving role of Black comedy in Hollywood  • How grains and grasses continue to feed humankind • Jack Kerouac’s posthumous manuscript sales • Five book reviews you need to read this week • Six books that unravel and remake fairytales • Am I the asshole for thinking book publicity is cringe? • The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • The power of a single cup of tea • The town where The Last Picture Show was filmed hated it • Diversity and the fourth season of Bridgerton • Why writers need to “follow the chemistry” • The best reviewed books of the month • On Richard Holmes’s The Boundless Deep • Tour Maggie Smith’s writing space