Lit Hub Weekly: May 18 - 22, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
- “I never imagined reading books and turning them into movies was a job.” It is, and if you can read a book every two days (and write a book report about it), it could be yours… | Lit Hub Film
- Katherine Packert Burke considers eight different attempts at explaining the purpose of trans literature. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Why you shouldn’t feel guilty about the “great books” you haven’t read. | Lit Hub Craft
- Katherine Kelaidis explains why you should be reading Russian dissident literature. | Lit Hub Politics
- Alex Tan examines the politics of plotlessness through Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork, a novel whose “apparent arc is one of oblivion.” | The Baffler
- Emily Herring considers generational le mal du siècle, from Alfred de Musset and George Sand to the present. | Aeon
- Jonah C. Sirott explores what two recent books, one about Jerry Garcia and the other about the politics of power of professional wrestling, explain about the state of everything, basically. | LARB
- What we learn from Kids is that Minnelli lived Garland’s life to the full.” Frances Wilson on Liza Minnelli’s “riveting” new memoir. | NYRB
- Joshua Bennett considers the life and work of poet, attorney, and judge Bruce M. Wright: “There was truly no moment in his adult life, as far as I can tell, when Wright wasn’t trying to shake up the world.” | Poetry
- Jaroslav Švelch considers videogame creatures and the nuanced morality of monster slaying. | The MIT Press Reader
- “Just as the worth of knowledge that enlivens us is endless, the work of acquiring it never ends.” David S. Wallace (re)considers “didactic art.” | The New Yorker
- Fellas, should a man think(eth)? | The New York Times Magazine
- Vincent Noce tells the story of the “Madoff of manuscripts,” Gérard Lhéritier. | Financial Times
- “[M]y surreal day-to-day, a regular life broken up by suspensions of my rights, stopped mattering.” Abraham Jiménez Enoa on running an independent newspaper in Cuba (tr. Lily Meyer). | The Dial
- Edwidge Danticat talks to Kaitlyn Greenidge about craft, ghosts, and the limits of writing routines. | Harper’s Bazaar
- Theresa Montaño and Oriel María Siu remember how Rudy Acuña reshaped both Chicano studiesand history. | The Nation
- Foster Kamer talks to 12 creative people about how they use—or, mercifully, don’t use—AI. (Shockingly, James Frey loves it.) | GQ
- “What can liberation possibly mean amid a genocide? After what Israel did to Gaza, which is harder: death or survival?” Nasser Abu Srour on surviving torture in Israel’s prisons (tr. Luke Leafgren). | Equator
- What the Commonwealth Short Story Prize AI scandal reveals about the current state of writing. | The Atlantic
Also on Lit Hub:
Gifts for the graduating English major • How a 1970’s soap opera made unexpectedly subversive daytime television • Anton Hur on the myth of the finicky English reader • Fighting cancer in parallel with the protagonist of you novel • This week in literary history, James Joyce and Marcel Proust meet once (and never again) • The coming-of-illness narrative as a bildungsroman • The scrappy perseverance of England’s lower-league football teams • Where can the nation-state go from here? • Growing up with a mom on the FBI’s most wanted list • Steven W. Thrasher on copaganda, pinkwashing, and the time he almost joined the NYPD • Natalie Lemle talks to Nicole Cherubini • What it means to teach writing to kids (after dropping out of school) • Robert Isaacs makes meaning from pushing buttons • Books that expose social mobility myths • The parallels between quilting and writing • Everyone’s talking about Salome right now • George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and audio narratives • Pawn shop wisdom on object-based writing • How This is Your Brain on Music transformed music cognition • Why it’s difficult to cut the ephemera from a novel • George Washington failed into an unpaid (undeserved) internship • Rachel Mills recommends sisterly books • The power of hormones • Namwali Serpell and Tracy K. Smith discuss Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye • How American schools are being remodeled with far-right values • What happens when billionaires control the media? • “My beloved writing group forget my birthday… Are they the literary assholes? • The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • Ece Temelkuran remembers exile and authoritarianism • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Everyone is an AI cop now • Does Xi Jinping really think China is Athens and the US is Sparta? • What’s a book x-ray? • Life beyond planet Earth • The racial and musical motivations behind America’s first war on drugs • Rebecca Chace revisits Mary McCarthy’s “scandalous bestseller” • Coming home to Jakarta and leaving for New York • The best reviewed books of the week • How Tom Drury’s The End of Vandalism helped Ross McMeekin
