Lit Hub Weekly: September 15 - 19, 2025

• ​​Why read 28 book lists when you could just read one? Here is the ultimate fall reading list. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• How can parents raise readers in the age of digital distraction? “Our job as parents isn’t to eliminate technology—it’s to create intentional spaces where deep attention can flourish.” | Lit Hub Technology
• Lucy Worsley explains why, after 250 years, we can’t stop reading Jane Austen (and why Austen would have loved her enduring fame). | Lit Hub Biography
• Anne Sebba chronicles how the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz survived the death camps and considers the role of music amidst genocide. | Lit Hub History
• Mahmoud Khalil talks to Nan Goldin about Palestine, protest, and hope. | Dazed
• Horror author Gretchen Felker-Martin discusses the cancellation of her run on Red Hood following comments she made about Charlie Kirk: “I had no regrets.” | The Comics Journal
• Katya Schwenk considers the escalating business of college textbooks. | Jacobin
• “Conflict is essential to the history of feminism, to the history of the university, and to the history of democracy.” Annabel Barry, Caroline Goddard, and Anna Park on women’s studies as an archive of conflict. | Public Books
• Actually, we need another inspiring librarian story: April White on Augusta Baker, the legendary children’s librarian of Harlem. | JSTOR Daily
• “He had a deep, theatrical frown to go along with his ‘deep, policeman-type voices.’ He was ‘zany,’ yes. And also uncommonly sincere.” Katie Engelhart profiles beloved children’s author Robert Munsch amid his struggle with dementia. | The New York Times Magazine
• “When I find a garment that has the magic, that makes me the person I aspire to be, I cling and refuse to let go.” Rachel Kushner contemplates yearning and style. | The New Yorker
• Matthew Wills looks at the origins of the word “vampire” and representations of the undead across cultures and mythologies. | JSTOR Daily
• Journalists Óscar Martínez and Carlos Martínez on being forced to leave Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador. | The Dial
• “The technology changes, the content changes, the purposes change, but the artistic urge to create a sense of the lifelike, the moving, the temporal in a visual art that is otherwise static remains unchanged.” Leo Braudy on the Lucas Museum and the question of narrative art. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• André Breton discusses astrology in a 1954 interview with Jean Carteret and Roger Knabe for L’Astrologie Moderne. | Harper’s
• “There is no longer a foreign ‘elsewhere’ where we can displace our anxieties. America is the imperial, authoritarian ‘Other.’” John Semley considers the state of cinematic villains. | The Baffler
• “AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.” The n+1 editors consider LLMs. | n+1
• David B. Williams enumerates the reasons to embrace urban nature. | Orion
• In the category of “we hate it, but we’re not surprised,” librarians are being asked to find AI hallucinated books for patrons. | 404 Media

Also on Lit Hub:

Reading Omar El Akkad during a time of protest in Serbia • On bodybuilding, poetry, and transformation • How “worlds of beauty and cruelty collide” in The Sweet Dove Died • How the murder of Mahsa Jîna Amini sparked a revolution in Iran • Read “BOY COMING OUT GAY GOING FAR TO LADY WAY TO QUEER,” a poem by Rickey Laurentiis • David Greig on his creative process aboard a Nordic cruise • Paul Slovak on the editor who nurtured John Steinbeck, James Joyce and more • Jane Ciabattari interviews Angela Flournoy about her new novel, The Wilderness • Where are all the books about mothers and sons? • G’Ra Asim talks to former MFA classmate Sasha Bonét • Books that capture the art of defining a diva • The life and career of abstract artist Emily Mason • Jeremy B. Jones highlights titles about complicated families • Trymaine Lee on finding meaning in Black survival • Read “The Body of Grief as Rice and Butter,” a poem by Alison Lubar • Why composting “is a creative, unscripted act” • Am I the asshole for hating literary awards season? • How feminists fought to recognize the value of women’s domestic labor • 5 book reviews you need to read this week •Margot Kahn reflects on leaving a particular poem out of her collection •  Heidi Seaborn on waiting until her fifties to become a poet • How the English Civil War determined Great Britain’s future • Why humans and beavers could be the ultimate environmental collaborators • The tragically unfulfilled promise of Korea’s Asian Spring • The best reviewed books of the week • On the untapped comedic potential of writing about Catholicism • The writing benefits of being on the road • The secrets and presence of tawny owls