September 2, 2025 ‹

The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

TODAY: In 1820, Lucretia Hale is born.

• “In Israel, the literary world censors, silences, distorts, segregates and thus collaborates with the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza.” An open letter from an editor in Israel. | Lit Hub Politics
• Rabhi Alameddine considers depressing books that could cheer you up by Gerbrand Bakker, Hans Fallada, Leo Tolstoy, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Logan Karlie explores the literary afterlives of Labyrinth and the liminal space between dreams and reality. | Lit Hub Film
• From spooky quests to new tellings of familiar tales, Caroline Carlson recommends 10 great children’s books coming out in September. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• You don’t need to love The House of Mirth (or, what we can learn from books we don’t like). | Lit Hub Criticism
• This month’s new poetry leans into mystics, martyrs, bats, blood sonnets! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Natalie Zutter highlights fall sci-fi and fantasy by C.L. Clark, Naomi Novik, K.J. Parker, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Jane Ciabattari talks to Joan Silber: “I’ve never been a writer who knows what she’s doing before she sets out.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
• The 20 books out today include titles by Arundhati Roy, Nathan Harris, Bolu Babalola, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “The Colombian heiress had problems of her own, obviously. Traumas I couldn’t relate to.” Read “The Heiress” from Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s collection, Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! | Lit Hub Fiction
• Richard Grant visits Cormac McCarthy’s personal library, two years after the author’s death. | Smithsonian Magazine
• “Her white is not only luminous but also blinding. Empty, but filled to the point of overwhelm. It is a frequency too saturated to parse.” Dashiel Carrera considers whiteness in sleep, the Velvet Underground, and Han Kang’s latest novel. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• What growing up with a magician as a father can teach about skepticism and curiosity. | The MIT Press Reader
• “Few fruits carry as many contradictions as the Punica granatum, better known as the pomegranate.” On the mythology and medicine of the poet’s favorite fruit. | JSTOR Daily
• What John Updike got wrong about the aftermath of Katrina: “Maybe it wouldn’t have been worth it to criticize his imperfect or, frankly, lazy and racist analysis.” | Oxford American
• Everyone’s Bourdainposting (but they don’t understand Bourdain). | Vulture

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