Lit Hub Weekly: May 19 - 23, 2025

• Inside the “new kind of distinctly Black creative self-making” born from the editorial relationship between Toni Morrison and Muhammad Ali. | Lit Hub Biography
• Hari Kunzru reflects on Edward Said’s “startlingly contemporary” Culture and Imperialism at 30. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Debbie Urbanski on the invasive expectations of book publicity and why writers shouldn’t feel obligated to share too much. | Lit Hub Craft
• “There is no higher praise for a work of factual writing than to say that it reads like a John McPhee book.” Peter Hessler on a beloved mentor and tireless proponent of creative nonfiction. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi on ICE, activism, and Palestine after being released from detainment. | Democracy Now!
• Hanif Abdurraqib writes in defense of despair. | The New Yorker
• “The NEA has always been threatened.” Adam Morgan on how the loss of NEA grants impacts small publishers and literary magazines. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Yiyun Li discusses radical acceptance, finding a vocabulary for extreme pain, and Things in Nature Merely Grow, her memoir about losing both her sons to suicide. | The Guardian
• “Here, education is no longer a pathway to opportunity; it is a fight for survival.” Four students in Gaza on how they keep studying amid genocide. | The Intercept
• Aaron Boehmer looks at the visual language of underground and alternative newspapers through the ages. | Los Angeles Review of Books 
• Lily Meyer explores the legacy of Argentina’s six-year-old leftist comics heroine, Mafalda. | The Dial
• Nora Claire Miller meditates on the history of screensavers and the passage of time. | The Paris Review
• “We need collectivism right now, and it will look like folk literature: writing by a community, about a community, for a community, in service of a wider humanity.” Greta Rainbow on literary movements, past and future. | Dirt
• “By her telling, those who want to lead a democratic country over the brink into authoritarian tactics begin by intending to deceive others, succumb to self-deception, and fall eventually into the atmosphere of ‘defactualization.’” On Trump, fascism, and Hannah Arendt’s essay, “Lying in Politics.” | Public Books
• “Telling one’s story in one’s own understanding, reclaiming it, repositions refugees as actants and not just passive victims of violent historical currents.” Peter Sloan discusses his new study of refugee literature. | JSTOR Daily
• James Hannaham on Essex Hemphill’s (profane, transgressive, sexy, bold) poetic legacy. | Poetry
• Joel Suarez considers education’s “fraught relationship to both elitism and democracy.” | n+1
• Translator Ann Goldstein recommends books with “solid English rhythms, English idioms, English locutions, English sounds—the things that I like to have somewhere in my mind, though not necessarily consciously, when I’m working.” | The New Yorker
• “Her debut novel…was far more daring for its time than any of the recent literary trends that have had everyone blushing and gasping and scribbling.” Namwali Serpell revisits Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales.| New York Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Turning an obsession with your therapist into a novel •  On learning to love literary influences • Mariam Itani on Beirut, home, and the paradox of living in Jordan • Lorna Graham recommends novels on the workplace • The influence of Miguel de Cervantes’ illegitimate daughter, Isabel de Saavedra • Literature’s most iconic culinary moments • On cults and Katherine Mansfield’s final days • On Spinoza’s metaphysics and finding the many rooms within ourselves • The similarities between experimenting in the kitchen and on the page • Why you can never permanently ruin a piece of writing • Reviving a radical Black liberation movement in Atlanta and beyond • The impact of contemporary problems on fiction • Meg Serino recommends novels that depict destructive relationships • How to preserve the essence of language • America’s obsession with avocados • The tension between truth and imagination while writing place • What draws us to danger in our relationships? • When Oasis toured America • What’s on Alison Bechdel’s TBR? • 5 book reviews you need to read this week •  Why AI slop is so much sloppier than anything a human could write • On the magic of Montauk, New York • Desire, death, and subtext in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever • On Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” • The best reviewed books of the week • The surprising connection between Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse • Martha Park recommends apocalyptic nonfiction • The role of sight on the page and in real life