August 11 – 15, 2025 ‹

The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

TODAY: In 1998, journalist and author Dorothy West dies. 

• “Am I a writer first, or a grocer?” Karleigh Frisbie Brogan explains how working a non-literary day job helped her writing. | Lit Hub Craft
• On the artistic transformations of Constantine Cavafy, the most influential poetic voice in modern Greek literature. | Lit Hub Biography
• Noah Giansiracusa on how data dominates every facet of our lives (and how we can reclaim our humanity). | Lit Hub Technology
• On 65 years of Green Eggs and Ham and how we handle the complex legacy of Theodor Geisel. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “I found in their poetics an understanding of the “outside”: the gender outside, the class outside of mainstream culture and mainstream writing.” Roberto Bedoya on Norma Cole and the poetics of place. | Poetry
• Beloved bother: Hannah Engler considers her connection to her great-uncle and the unexpected power of a typo. | Longreads  
• “Fascists will not stop us from drawing what must be drawn, from expressing what we believe in.” Look inside an iconic comics and zine festival in Rome. | The Comics Journal
• “Research, writing, and, above all, thinking have always meant more than simply producing an answer.” Dan Rockmore on what it’s like to brainstorm with A.I. | The New Yorker 
• Jennifer Zacharia reports on the murder of Anas al-Sharif, and Israel’s war on Palestinian journalists. | Boston Review
• “Her work moves between the ongoing catastrophe of American poverty and a sense of unabashed astonishment, an unrelenting obsession with the stars.” Joshua Bennett writes an elegy to Nikki Giovanni. | Poetry
• “The scenes of prison break from Khiam to Sednaya offer us a glimpse into a possible, yet precarious freedom.” The trajectory of prison liberation and abolition across the Middle East. | The Baffler
• “After the disastrous meeting, he began asking around about where an original golden ticket from the 1971 Willy Wonka movie, a highly valuable collector’s item, could be pawned.” What do crypto bros have to do with Ronald Dahl? It’s a (really) wild story. | New York Magazine
• Riley MacLeod plays Tiny Bookshop, a bookstore management simulation game. | Aftermath
• “A chasm that those who have crossed must spend the rest of their lives coming to terms with”: Aaron Labaree considers the genre of class transition in books by Claire Baglin, Annie Ernaux, and Éduoard Louis. | Public Books
• Anne Lamott talks to Pamela Alma Weymouth about hope, the pain that leads to change, and “action as a verb.” | The Nation
• Ali Ghanim, a pseudonymous Palestinian journalist living in the US, remembers Anas Al-Sharif as a friend. | The Intercept
• Eighty years after the atomic bomb, Rachel Greenley contemplates narrative, omission, and the ethics of turning life into art. | Orion
• Laura Miller explores how Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny took over TikTok (and the bestseller list). | Slate
• Nolan Kelly watches two cinematic adaptations of Sigrid Nunez novels: “Of course, you have to cast someone.”  | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub:

The humor and tragedy in trying (and failing) to conceive • The influence of shyness on Charlotte Brontë’s storytelling • Madeleine Beekman traces the mysterious evolution of language  • How abortion bans escalate risks of life-threatening violence • Reading books about babies as a new mother • Embracing analog research methods at the library • Penelope Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee, and authorial happenstance • Authors take the Lit Hub questionnaire • How the AIDS epidemic laid the foundations for American sex ed • Life in Gaza through the lens of WB Yeats’s “The Second Coming” • The challenges of writing a novel about the war in Ukraine • 30 years of Adrienne Salinger’s Teenagers in Their Bedrooms • Mocha Dick, the real life inspiration behind Herman Melville’s white whale • On Thomas Paine’s guide to fighting dictatorship • Exploring the life of Penelope Fitzgerald through fiction • James Schuyler’s first public reading brought out poets from every corner of New York • If Supreme Court justices get seven-figure book deals, who will judge publishing-related cases? • The dark allure of writing about islands • Family legacies, Black fatherhood, and the dreams and fears of parenting • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Searching for the best way to tell the story of America • Traversing the physical and memory landscape of North America • Read “Blood Moon,” a prose poem by Anne Waldman • This week on the Lit Hub Podcast! •  On addiction, motherhood, and advocating for unhoused people •  A tale of friendship, deceit, and the seedy lows of high art • Family, ghosts, and sour cherries in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine • The best reviewed books of the week • We should all probably go outside • Read “Old Song,” a poem by Nima Hasan • Yiming Ma explains the benefits of writing blind

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