Lit Hub

A Far-Flung Life When Sneaky Snook in his mail truck happened upon the wreckage near the boundary of Meredith Downs, sheep were scattered along the roadside and the fence, bleating, dazed. Anyone approaching the sc…

“When Sneaky Snook in his mail truck happened upon the wreckage near the boundary of Meredith Downs, sheep were scattered along the roadside and the fence, bleating, dazed.” Read from M.L. Stedman’s new novel, A Far-flung Life.

“The Terrible Years.” A Poem by Carolina Ebeid January wears two faces— you will call one future, the other history, both are elsewhere: the elsewhere of photographs, in which memory turns angular, deckle-edged: here in the gold film light of B…

“January wears two faces— / you will call one future, the other / history, both are elsewhere.” Read Carolina Ebeid’s poem “The Terrible Years.” from the collection, Hide.

What We Lose When We Gamify Reading At the dawn of 2026, I spent an irresponsible amount of time cataloguing what I did in 2025. There are so many ways to aggregate a personality these days: Letterboxd kept track of how many movies y…

@marissalevien.bsky.social makes a case against gamified reading.

The Fight for Economic Justice and the Pathway Out of Poverty More than twenty years ago, I slowly pushed a clattering shopping cart out through the lazy automatic doors of a Williamsburg Food Lion, with no groceries, just my hungry toddler looking up at me w…

How expanding educational opportunities can carve paths away from poverty.

5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week Our selection of great reviews to read this week include Alex Preston on M. L. Stedman’s A Far-Flung Life, Megan Milks on Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn, Chris Vognar on Rebecca Solnit’s The…

“The beauty and breadth of the landscape stand in counterpoint to the horrors of the human lives playing out upon it.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week.

Language as Resistance: Camonghne Felix on the Liberatory Potential of Poetry A poetic education is premised on the assumption of creative agency, on the idea that each reader has the ability to imagine illusion, to see illusion, to articulate illusion. The training is in le…

“We can go to poetry to mark the design of the world we see and the world we desire to conjure.” Camonghne Felix on the liberatory potential of poetry.

Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, AND American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound? By the spring of 1939, the widely acknowledged dean of Anglo-American Modernist poetry, fifty-three-year-old Ezra Pound, had lived in Europe for three decades. After leaving the United States in 19…

On Ezra Pound, Mussolini’s biggest fan: “…Pound lauded Mussolini’s accomplishments—such as reducing crime and improving Italy’s road and railway networks—while also advocating that fascism was the only cure…”

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Nonfiction Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for nonfiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Associatio…

Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for nonfiction.

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. …

Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction.

James Sullivan on the Power of Protest Music Pop culture critic James Sullivan joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the history of American protest music. Sullivan, the author of the book Which Side Are You On?: 2…

NEW EPISODE: Pop culture critic James Sullivan joins co-hosts @sugi.bsky.social and Whitney Terrell to discuss the history of American protest music and his book Which Side Are You On?: 20th Century American History in 100 Protest Songs.
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Introducing Dirt Books, a Publishing Imprint For the 22nd Century Dirt, which has fast become one of our favorite sites for off-the-beaten-path media takes, is launching an imprint. Please give a warm welcome to Dirt Books. The brand new house aims to shake up th…

Dirt Media has a new imprint: hello and welcome to Dirt Books, launching with titles by @punkrockdoll.bsky.social and Geoffrey Mak.

On Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House Though the Lens of Childrearing Once upon a time, Shirley Jackson lived in a shambling Vermont house and between sandwiches and screaming, baths, diapers, and stories, she wrote. Shirley Jackson walked around her neighborhood fee…

“What is it about motherhood and ghosts?” @equitation.bsky.social looks at The Haunting of Hill House through the lens of raising children.

Why We Must Fight to Stop HR 7661 Before It Destroys the Lives of American Children Lately I’ve been calling my House rep and screaming about one zillion things, and maybe you have too. But today I want to talk about one thing in particular you should add to your list: H.R. 7661 i…

How a bill targeting trans literature could ban all LGBTQ+ books from American public schools (and why you should care).

Gunk I’ve wanted to be a mother for as long as I can recall. As a child, I had no friends my own age. At school, I preferred to play imaginary games with the younger kids in the playground. I’d be the k…

“I’ve wanted to be a mother for as long as I can recall. As a child, I had no friends my own age. At school, I preferred to play imaginary games with the younger kids in the playground.” Read from Saba Sams’s new novel, Gunk.

How Writing a Book About Diaries Changed How I Wrote My Own Diary Entries For several years, while I was working on a book about the diary’s role in our lives and culture, I actively looked for “diary stories” and found them, which fueled my hunch that the diary or journ…

How writing a book about diaries changed how Betsy Rubiner wrote in her own.

Growing Up Alawite in Assad’s Syria I slip off my shoes and leave them on the cement as my grandmother Wadia, my mother’s mother, leans into a rough wooden door with all her weight until it opens. She leads me into a dim room, the on…

Loubna Mrie explores the intersections of family, faith and national history in Assad’s Syria.

A spot of good news! Adult fiction sales are up 1%. As Publishers Weekly reported yesterday, there’s a little bit to celebrate this week in Bookland. Industry analyst and Circana BookScan employee Brenna Connor recently gave a bird’s eye…

As Publishers Weekly reports, adult fiction sales are up (and it’s looking good for indies).

When Persistence Pays Off: On Translating and Publishing the Work of Kanako Nishi This is one of those publishing stories where the author—and in this case the translator too—waited for years, certain that their work deserved a wider audience, and was forced to stand patiently b…

Allison Markin Powell recounts the experience of translating and publishing the work of Kanako Nishi.

Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles wins this year’s Clark Fiction Prize. The 2026 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize has been awarded to Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a funny novel about a dissatisfied and underemployed young woman who …

The 2026 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize has been awarded to Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a novel about a dissatisfied and underemployed woman who decides to keep a baby, let her estranged pro-wrestler father move in with her, and start an OnlyFans.

What I Learned About American Men in My All-Male Book Club It’s a Tuesday night and after work I’m meeting up with six other guys at a nearby British pub for a couple of pints and some fish and chips. But we aren’t gathering to watch Premiere League footba…

If you’re done with the “men don’t read” discourse, trying reading about @kristopherjansma.bsky.social’s all-male book club instead.

The American Library Association’s workers have formed a union. Workers at the American Library Association have announced that they’re forming union with AFSCME Council 31. When the new union is certified, American Library Association Workers United/AFSCME wil…

Workers at the American Library Association have announced that they’re forming union with AFSCME Council 31.

Gisèle Pelicot’s Memoir is the Ultimate Act of Defiance Gisèle Pelicot had resigned herself to a life of quiet victimhood. In France, all victims of sexual violence have the right to anonymity, and she had clung to it for years, her mind made up that sh…

Noëlle de Leeuw examines Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir as an act of defiance and a call to social change.

How Christianity Was Used By the Powerful and the Marginalized to Shape Post-Civil War America Charles Shelton, a “home” missionary in the Dakota Territory, penned an article in 1885 for a missions magazine titled “The Indians from a Christian Standpoint.” He hoped to inspire more evangelist…

Matthew Avery Sutton explores how Christianity shaped post-Civil War America.

Ghost Writing: On AI Before AI When is an author not an author? The question feels like the lead up to a nerdy joke. But these days, with the looming presence of artificial intelligence, I feel as if I am asking that question ev…

Before the advent of AI, there were (and still are) ghostwriters.

Night Night Fawn Gooood morning. Office of Doctor Eli Zilch. You don’t end with a questioning tone. This is important. You have to end with an ambiguous lilt, the tone of which is impossible to indicate through pun…

“You don’t end with a questioning tone. This is important. You have to end with an ambiguous lilt, the tone of which is impossible to indicate through punctuation on a page.” Read from @jordyrosenberg.bsky.social’s new novel, Night Night Fawn.

A Woman in the World: Colm Tóibín on the Short Fiction of Mary Lavin Like Myra in her story “A Memory,” Mary Lavin lived in a mews house behind Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin. She also had a house on a bend of the river Boyne in County Meath, north of Dublin, a place …

Colm Tóibín considers the short fiction of Mary Lavin: “She had spent her life describing others and finding strategies to create versions of herself on the page; it was not easy to categorize her.”

Rebecca Solnit, Vigdis Hjorth, Terry Tempest Williams, and more: 23 new books out today! Some stunning nonfiction, some scintillating novels: it’s the beginning of a new month, one that promises more sunshine, and more life-giving literature. Rebecca Solnit, Terry Tempest William…

The 23 new books out today include titles by Rebecca Solnit, Vigdis Hjorth, Terry Tempest Williams, and more!

How authors can protect themselves from scams, according to a book publicist. Publishing scams are everywhere right now — and they are getting slicker and harder to detect. As a book publicist who works every day with serious nonfiction authors, I’m seeing more and more writ…

@jessicapellien.bsky.social breaks down nine ways to identify a publishing scam.

Why So Many Women Are Writing About Bears As a daughter of a wildlife biologist growing up in the Canadian wilderness, I’ve been fascinated with bears since I was a child. When I was only five years old, my father brought home an orphaned …

@trinamoyles.bsky.social explores the women adding their voices to the canon of bear literature.

Here are the finalists for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction. Today, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced the five finalists for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The judging panel, which this year was comprised of Samantha Hunt, Tania James, and De’S…

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the five finalists for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.