Lit Hub Weekly: July 7 – 11, 2025

TODAY: In 1817, Henry David Thoreau is born.  

• “I didn’t care how I was represented, as long as I was on TV.” Sarah Hartshorne on surviving the horrors (of America’s Next Top Model). | Lit Hub TV
• How stoned was Shakespeare when he wrote Hamlet? Sam Kelly investigates. | Lit Hub History
• “Language-switching says something about Billy Parham’s ancestry, upbringing and his ability to survive.” Rachel Ashcroft meditates on the joys of reading books in multiple languages. | Lit Hub Criticism 
• Peter Balakian on the lessons modern readers can learn from Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1964 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. | Lit Hub Politics
• “To most of us, that Carlyle was so beloved by the leader of the Nazi party is, at the least, a questionable mark against the Victorian thinker.” On Hitler, Curtis Yarvin, and why the far right loves reading Thomas Carlyle. | Public Books
• Wells Tower has found your luggage. | The Cut
• Professor Marcia Bjornerud explains time literacy (and wants you to pay more attention to rocks). | Atmos
• Mary Jo Bang on the importance of vernacular when translating Dante’s Paradiso to English. | Asymptote
• “In such stories, crabs are a symbol of efficient, brutal evolution at its simplest.” Will humans evolve into crabs? Michael Garfield explains. | Aeon
• How can design move forward as a field? Maybe it needs some literary inspiration. | The MIT Press Reader
• “Kesey was a divine fool, an unwitting figure in a conservative revolution.” Nick Burns on the reissue of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. | The Nation
• Tired: naming a city after a dead colonizer. Wired: naming a city after “the vengeful ghost of a woman.” | JSTOR Daily
• How media is trying to survive the “traffic apocalypse” (and this time, it’s not pivot to video). | New York Magazine
• Yooj Chun explores what it means to read Han Kang during political crisis in South Korea. | Public Books
• Tegan O’Neil takes you inside the 1982 DC Comics style guide. | The Comics Journal
• Chloe Garcia Roberts interviews the late Fanny Howe: “Generally, I wouldn’t want to be trapped with other writers, ever.” | The Paris Review
• “A strong model for the opportunity Danielewski saw in this burgeoning TV phenomenon might be the story of how Family Guy took off.” Alexander Sorondo on Mark Z. Danielewski’s unfinished novel. | The Metropolitan Review
• Why the technology behind the slop clogging your feeds is also the technology of war. | The Baffler
• On Roland Barthes’ essay “The World of Wrestling” and the kayfabe of American politics. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: 

Our most anticipated sci-fi, fantasy, and horror titles for the rest of 2025 • The over saturation of cruelty in the digital age • On killing a coyote • Lunch Dances, an immersive library theater performance • The history and legacy of the Great Wagon Road • How jailhouse lawyers save their fellow inmates • The 20 new books out today • Can you write a universal story? • Jane Ciabattari interviews Gary Shteyngart •  Authors answer our burning questions about how they write • Mary Jo Bang on the grand journey of Dante’s Paradiso • Christopher J. Yates meditates on linguistic homesickness • Margot Singer on writing the memoir her father couldn’t • Nick Ripatrazone remembers Fanny Howe • The history of the literary billionaire • How does a critic write a novel about critics? • On the Jewish woman incarcerated in a WWII-era camp for Japanese Americans • If you write with AI, you’re definitely the asshole • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • How a mother’s love for film impacted a daughter’s writing • Take some writing advice from E.B. White • Wanjeri Gakuru recommends essential Kenyan books • Black Panther and Black futures • Why genre isn’t a trap, but a tool • Michael T. Luongo remembers Edmund White • The best reviewed books of the week • The art of building mythologies 

​Literary Hub