Lit Hub Weekly: November 10 - 14, 2025

• The 2025 National Book Award Finalists answer our questions about their books, their reading habits, and their writing lives! | Lit Hub In Conversation
• “The sickness that once detached him from life had now made him greedy for experience.” How Robert Louis Stevenson navigated a lifetime of chronic illness. | Lit Hub Biography
• Maria Kunetsova remembers when the publishing industry gambled on her (and how she coped when she realized it lost). | Lit Hub Memoir
• Boris Groys examines how Alexandre Kojève made sense of the nothingness of human existence. | Lit Hub History
• “Let me initiate you into some of the mysteries that have come to plague me.” Jae Towle Viera considers the unexpected effects of reading to their child. | Defector
• “When I was first told she had dementia, I was happy to learn she was not evil but merely sick.” Sujatha Gidla on caring for her mother. | Granta
• Sarah Bochicchio reads postcards from Virginia Woolf. | The Paris Review
• Hannah Goldfield revisits Anthony Bourdain’s seminal New Yorker piece, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” | The New Yorker
• How fashion houses learned to embrace a literary aesthetic (or, how literature became cool again). | GQ
• Matthew Gault reports on the small Michigan town fighting against an AI datacenter with connections to nuclear weapons. | 404 Media
• “To its users, the web browser was a lovely tool. To its owners, it was a platform—a means of control, a system that locked users in and monitored their behavior.” James Gleick considers new books about the decline of the internet. | New York Review of Books
• “What appeared to be a single extrajudicial killing now looked like a program to eliminate Khalistani activists across North America.” Karan Majahan on the killing of a Canadian Sikh. | Granta
• Bookstores across the country are setting up food banks to help SNAP recipients. | The New York Times
• Jonathan Agin considers William Blake’s “radically anti-imperialist, counter-enlightenment spirit.” | Jacobin
• Greg Hunter applies a late-style reading to the comics of Gilbert Hernandez. | The Comics Journal
• Janus Rose explains why AI is the ultimate forced meme. | Aftermath
• “Perhaps the only thing the Proud Boys and antifa have in common is their attachment to Fight Club and by extension to the Cacophony Society and SantaCon.” Chuck Palahniuk explains what went wrong with SantaCon. | Vulture
• Moti Mizrahi examines the human desire to play God. | JSTOR Daily
• In reading recent memoirs by Supreme Court Justices, Ruth Marcus learns how the idea of judicial restraint leads to radical outcomes. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub:

The potential and pitfalls of automation • Why Sarah Hall stamped her new novel with a Human-Written maker’s mark • Titles in translation from university presses • The decades-long siege on the people of Gaza • Writing a romance novel with a former NHL player • The biases and blind spots behind American Girl • Gráinne O’Hare examines the power of female friendships • Read “Closed Season,” a poem by Monika Herceg • Playing dead and writing about gendered violence • Fictionalizing cinematic icons • Authors take the Lit Hub Questionnaire • Philosophical and literary approaches to the end of life • Channeling the spirits of Fellini, Pasolini, and Donati • How drummer Clyde Stubblefield pioneered R&B • The similarities between aphorisms and poetry • Taking inspiration from painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder • Mikhail Gorbachev’s early rise to power • David Graeber’s thoughts on structural stupidity • Grace Walker explains the influence of motherhood on her debut novel • Choosing the word of the year is an intense process • George Packer talks to Andy Hunter about his new novel • Am I the asshole for accusing my friend of plagiarizing a TV show? • On the first moments of ceasefire in Gaza • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Why film and literature can’t tell the truth about losing a parent • Eve Dunbar on Alice Childress • The subversive possibilities of form and function • What’s on Quiara Alegría Hudes’s TBR? • The best reviewed books of the week • Helen Lederer considers what it takes to be funny • The cognitive maps of human imagination • The fate of the Amur Tiger • Read “The Beer Drinker,” a poem by Jean Follain