Lit Hub Weekly: May 25 - 29, 2026

• Spend your summer reading with Lit Hub! Welcome to the Best of the Best Books reading challenge, where you’ll have the chance to meet your reading goals, win prizes, and prove you’re better than your friends. | Lit Hub
• What should you read this summer? The Lit Hub staff would like to present these 19 novels for your consideration. | Lit Hub Reading Lists 
• Jennie Durant explains how honey bees came to America: “In a sense, bees went from wild foragers to shift workers, clocking in for bloom season as beekeepers hustled them from farm to farm.” | Lit Hub History
• “I didn’t need professors. I didn’t need a lot of external guidance.” Why the best way to read “great books” is whenever you want and at your own pace. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Gaby del Valle wonders if a person can actually tell whether or not a piece of prose was composed by AI. | The Verge
• David O’Neill explores the beauty (and utility) of weird writing advice. | The New Yorker
• Dan Chiasson talks growing up in Bernie’s Burlington. | Jacobin
• “We know that reading digital texts does not simply replicate the experience of reading print ones. Yet we still discount the tools that deepen comprehension in favor of those that are more convenient.” Sheila Liming on the destruction of a university library. | The Yale Review
• How cartoonist Alan Dunn satirized the strangest architectural trends of 20th century America. | The MIT Press Reader
• This one’s for the data lovers: check out this analysis of 200,000 similes from fiction. | The Pudding
• Twenty years later, Abel Reyes gives the final page of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home a close reading. | The Comics Journal
• Why, in the era of sensitivity readers, “there is little room…for a meaningful reform of publishing.” | The Nation
• Katherine Williams takes a post-reality look at books that “wonder how to build back democracy and wring their hands about aesthetic encounters shaped ever-more by AI, platforms, and the attention economy.” | Dirt
• Nonfiction publishing has no plan for skyrocketing AI adoption. | New York Magazine
• Angelina Mazza digs into the strange practice of updating the cultural references in YA books. | The New York Times
• Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein on Italian literature and translation as a feminist practice. | Asymptote

Also on Lit Hub:

 The Helter Skelter details of the Manson Murders • Marilyn Monroe, literary icon • Namwali Serpell and Hanif Abdurraqib on Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon • Natalie Adler recommends gay ghost stories • The 18th century indigenous rebellion that came before the American Revolution • Joe Bond’s dad fact-checks his novel • Why Michael Crichton’s best novel flopped on film • The “gut-churning” experience of showing your parents your debut novel • The influence on treatment of the Black Death • We should have learned something from World War I • How making art and losing a job inform each other • Read “Expatriate’s Pantoum.,” a poem by Maria Nazos • Read “Your dangerous shoe.,” a poem by Lila Matsumoto • Why Margo’s Got Money Troubles is one of the best recent adaptations • Why AI is making the “infrastructures of capitalism” so much worse • On translating Higuchi Ichiyō, Japan’s first working woman writer •  5 book reviews you need to read this week • A family history of Indigenous resistance •  Namwali Serpell and Dionne Custer Edwards discuss Toni Morrison’s Sula • This week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • The speculative possibilities of queer literature and the last decade of AIDS writing • Why writers should embrace the chaotic process of play • May’s best reviewed books • May’s best book covers gave us a moody, atmospheric spring • The power of site-specific poetics • The literary film and TV coming to streaming • New paperbacks out in June • Read “Parallel Lives,” a poem by Eman Abdelhadi