Lit Hub Weekly: September 22 - 25, 2025

• “She made me feel that my ideas mattered. She took me seriously.” Marisa Silver examines the legacy of her mother, filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver, frame by frame. | Lit Hub Film
• Can’t decide which fall book to read? This flowchart has you covered. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Patricia A. Matthew explores class, leisure, and the historical context of Pride and Prejudice. | Lit Hub History
• Maris Kreizman offers seven tips for how to be a good literary citizen. | Lit Hub
• Jed Kudrick and Sean Dileonardi consider various translation renaissances, and the forces that determine geographical diversity in US publishing. | Public Books
• Trump is suing Penguin Random House for $15 billion for publishing Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. | Publishers Weekly
• “I don’t know if I know what plot is. I think you just have to get someone to the end of the book.” An interview with Sheila Heti. |  The Believer
• Dan Kois and Rebecca Onion—along with “more than a hundred authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, academics, and publishing pros”—select the 25 best children’s books of the last 25 years. | Slate
• “Sometime during 2018 or 2019, my YouTube algorithm started giving me videos from the Ayn Rand Institute.” Jordan Castro on reading like Ayn Rand (but not reading Ayn Rand). | The Paris Review
• On Michel Houellebecq and “the tension between immersion and performance.” | The Point
• “His general advice to people attempting to craft humane, precise, and literate prose has scarcely aged, and his own bracing style still informs and delights.” Ben Yagoda on Henry W. Fowler, “the autocrat of English usage.” | The New Yorker
• “Heat, once a matter of inconvenience, something to build one’s life around, is now a matter of life and death.” Lauren Markham on the startling visibility of climate crisis in Greece. | Broadcast
• Sabrina Weiss chronicles the challenges of protecting Peru’s beaches from oil spills: “A protected area draws more visitors, which means more infrastructure, more waste, more pressure on the local environment.” | The Dial
• “At first, it seemed important to me that the language we used reflect the horror of what was happening. But I was defeated in trying to secure the most basic changes.” Ismail Ibrahim recounts the experience of being the only Arab American staffer at a prestigious liberal magazine, post-October 7. | Bidoun
• “That’s Thomas Bernhard’s genius: a spiral is the perfect style for writing self-hatred.” Greta Rainbow on the Bernhardaissance. | Dirt
• “But the anti-trans hysteria that has swept through the United States over the past few years would never have found so much purchase without the participation of elite liberal political and media institutions.” How the media (and politicians) has failed trans people. | The Nation
• “What if, instead of resisting the deaths of the last survivors, we allow ourselves to accept their mortality?” AI scholar Benjamin Charles Germain Lee considers how the technology is being used to mediate the stories of Holocaust survivors. | Longreads
• Sasha Geffen revisits Joe Westmoreland’s Tramps Like Us, a classic of queer literature whose “greatest achievement is its ability to look into a time when illness and institutional abandonment foreclosed living possibility—and to enliven it from the inside.” | The Nation
• Ashley Dawson considers the future of sustainable energy through the lenses of two new books. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Vauhini Vara talks to John J. Lennon • How the kidnapping of Miguel de Cervantes shaped Don Quixote • Life at the intersection of trauma and illness • A Marxist examination of the economics of New World slavery • Read “Autoimmune Aubade,” a poem by Chet’la Sebree • On the many afterlives of Haiti’s misunderstood Henry Christophe • Eric Olson profiles Patricia Lockwood • On Muriel Spark’s favorite teacher (and her most famous protagonist) • How Bartolomé de las Casas bore witness to the violent conquest of the Americas • Read “Distinguished Office of Echoes,” a poem by Lisa Olstein • Omar Zahzah looks at digital settler colonialism and modern blacklisting • The necessity of Drag Queen Story Hour • John J. Lennon on exploitative entertainment and life in Sing Sing • The limits of language at the end of the world • The ideological evolution of Soviet dissidents • Archie Comics, Old Hollywood, and loving worlds where we don’t belong • A new golden age of biography • Jonathan Lethem talks to Jane Ciabattari • On the time Bruce Lee trained with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • On class and power in 16th-century Europe • The illusive beauty of iridescent sea creatures • A case for the importance of literary festivals • This week on the Lit Hub Podcast • How the power of choice shaped the modern world • The role of writing spaces in the lives of literary icons • Irene Yoo shares a recipe for samgyeopsal • September’s best reviewed books • On writing songs for fictional bands • Read “Sniped Sonnet,” a poem by Zeina Hashem Beck