Lit Hub Weekly: November 17 - 12, 2025

• John Hendrix considers post-apocalyptic narratives and the graphic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Steven W. Thrasher remembers writer, advocate, and friend Alice Wong: “Alice helped decolonize disability communities of their (often) white-centered nature and acted as a bridge between so many interdependent related struggles.” | Lit Hub Biography
• Orlando Reade explores the intersection of technology, desire and uncanny doppelgangers (also, Harry Potter fan fiction). | Lit Hub Memoir
• “Today’s Red Scare is as much about distraction as it is about indoctrination” On Zohran Mamdani, Taylor Swift, and the evolution of the Red Scare. | Lit Hub Politics
• Saree Makdisi on the human demands of the genocide after the genocide: “We cannot let our politicians get away with the idea that it is time for business as usual. It falls to us, as ordinary people of good will, to continue protesting, striking, boycotting.” | n+1
• Selma Dabbagh looks at Soraya Antonius’ The Lord as a portrait of a lost Palestine. | The Paris Review
• “Robert Kagan, who had once been a reliable neoconservative defender of a muscular American empire, transformed himself into democracy’s Cassandra.” Richard A. Greenwald considers politics in the age of humiliation. | The Baffler
• Natan Last reveals the hidden politics of the crossword puzzle. | The Nation
• “I make films first and foremost about what gets under my skin and doesn’t let me go. And my skin, it was always about actually my own people.” Mira Jacob talks to Mira Nair, filmmaker and Zohran’s mom. | Harper’s Bazaar
• Carl Rollyson on Sylvia Plath’s decision to die. | The Hedgehog Review
• “For me, Kafka is the paradigmatic example of a writer we read, even devour, and return to with joy, yet still hunger to see interpreted by others.” Jonathan Lethem on Kafka (and his dog). | The Nation
• “These days I have no passport, no documents. And even if I manage to get one, I cannot return to Egypt.” Ahmed Naji on exile and reinvention. | The Dial
• Eliza Clark offers (hopefully) the last word on “where are the male novelists?” | Vogue UK
• Chateaubriand writes of the “worthlessness” that followed Napoleon’s reign. | The Paris Review
• Zephyr Teachout mines recent books for answers about why multilevel marketing schemes continue to thrive. | New York Review of Books
• “Like most others in the group, she didn’t set out to find an AI boyfriend.” On the limits of technology and the splintering of an AI boyfriend subreddit. | The Cut
• Simon Dwihartana spends an evening with the Twi-Hards, twenty years after the publication of Twilight. | Interview
• Wang Ping considers the world-altering potential of translation, which gives “an understanding of the poem as a kernel in which a civilization is embedded, and translation as the key to open that kernel.” | Poetry
• “Before knowing the truth about Asperger’s involvement in Nazi eugenics, I thought his story would have been perfect movie material. Turns out Sosaku Kobayashi’s story is the one that actually needed a movie.” On Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window and disability under fascism. | Public Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Jeanette Winterson remembers the process behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit • Children’s liberation through children’s literature • Lessons on fascism from Weimar Germany • Dislocation and longing in Upstate New York • The impact of 19th century gun control on cowboys • How cartographers literally put fake towns on the map • Jane Ciabattari talks to Iida Turpenen • How “unsellable” expressionist artist Chaim Soutine became a phenomenon • Frode Grytten on becoming a writer and growing up in Norway • How do we know aliens do science? • The stylistic and thematic innovation of Find Him! • In praise of old maps • How the legacy of the French Revolution carried into the present • Simon Winchester considers the duality of wind •  Read “Tremor,” a poem by Fatema Abdoolcarim • Maris Kreizman encounters MAHA anti-vaxxers the Texas Book Festival • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Spending the night in the annex of the Anne Frank House • The toll of debt and economic precarity in America • Lily Meyer talks to Madeleine Arenivar • On Jennifer Dawson‘s forgotten 1961 classic, The Ha-Ha • The death of tech idealism and the rise of homelessness in Northern California • The best reviewed books of the week • Contradictory stories behind the meaning of Mount Rushmore • Benjamin Wood on taking it outside