January 19 – 23, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1961, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe are granted a divorce in Mexico on the grounds of “incompatibility.”
- Love our annual list of the year’s best book covers? Then you’ll go wild over the best book covers of the decade. | Lit Hub Design
- How the Universal Friend, America’s first nonbinary minister, preached equality and salvation for all. | Lit Hub Religion
- Anne Margaret Castro explains why Heated Rivalry is the perfect adaptation of the romance novel’s conventions. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Howard Bryant on Black leadership, interracial heroism, and the time Jackie Robinson testified against Paul Robeson in Congress. | Lit Hub Biography
- Katy Waldman considers the recent spate of nonfiction about people pleasing. | The New Yorker
- Isabelle Appleton visits the Lesbian Herstory Archives (and dives into the history of sapphic personal ads). | The Paris Review
- Joshua Bodwell traces the history of Charles Bukowski’s publisher, Black Sparrow Press, and its founder, John Martin. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Why are Zillennial writers so obsessed with Thomas Bernhard? Oscar Dorr explains why the Austrian satirist is speaking to the algorithm. | House House Magazine
- Robin D. G. Kelley remembers Queen Mother Moore, the activist who launched the modern fight for reparations, and “understood reparations and nation-building as inseparable.” | The Yale Review
- Martin Niemoller’s “first they came for…” speech has become an activist’s battle cry. But the anti-fascist lament has a dark secret history. | The Nation
- Chances are, you haven’t read the Chinese sci-fi novel The Morning Star of Lingao, but Afra Wang argues that “the secret to understanding modern China is all right there, contained within its prophetic, often frightening pages.” | Wired
- Robin D. G. Kelley and Deborah Chasman discuss Renee Good’s murder in the context of the broader history of police violence. | Boston Review
- On Niels Fredrik Dahl and Scandinavian “reality literature.” | Asymptote
- “It’s notable that Atwood spends so long dwelling on others’ criticism of her but devotes so little space to a significant relationship with another major writer. Her friendship with Alice Munro is relegated to a single paragraph.” Linda Hall considers the unsaid in Margaret Atwood’s new memoir. | The New Republic
- “In their everyday lives, Palestinians create spaces that negate Israeli violence.” Mona El-Ghobashy considers new books by postcolonial studies scholar Haidar Eid and journalist Mohammed Omer Almoghayer. | Public Books
- Colin Warren talks to Graham Granger, the student who was arrested for eating an AI art exhibit as anti-AI performance art. | The Nation
Also on Lit Hub:
Facing your fears in fiction • How the criminal justice system decides who gets to live or die • The question of maintaining an authorial brand • Finding a gateway to the old country in Kew Gardens, Queens • Read a poem by Diamond Forde • The history of technologically assisted writing • The ethical value of combatting climate change • Lauren Schott recommends books about Ohio • The day Bernie Goetz shot four unarmed teenagers • On reinvention and the economics of Taylor Swift • Read “borrowed image,” a poem By S*an D. Henry-Smith • What sets the Sad Girl Grifter (SGG) apart from her lying, scheming peers • The best reviewed books of the week • The first step to finding an agent? Picking up a lot of books • How an enslaved gardener made the pecan a cash crop • The enduring power of Regency romance heroines • Read three poems by Molly Ledbetter • Is art the last refuge of our humanity?