#i like your shoelaces#thanks i stole them from the president#moby dick#the taming of the shrew#pride and prejudice#great expectations#the house of mirth#brideshead revisited#kafkaesque#the metamorphosis#frankenstein#emma#the catcher in the rye#the talented mr ripley#mary shelley#jane austen#shakespeare
August 13, 2025
Today, we’re reading about the real whale behind Moby-Dick, seeing what history can teach us about fighting dictators, examining how sex ed emerged from the AIDS epidemic, and more!
- Margaret Grace Myers examines the grim legacy of Ronald Reagan and how the AIDS epidemic laid the foundations for sex ed in America. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Hunger now governs time. It becomes the unrelenting measure by which each hour is known.” Alaa Alqaisi on life in Gaza through the lens of WB Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Sam Wachman on the challenges of writing a novel about the war in Ukraine and literature as “a force for peace and solidarity.” | Lit Hub Craft
- Tobias Wolff reflects back on 30 years of Adrienne Salinger’s Teenagers in Their Bedrooms: “The humanity of these young faces implies a depth of feeling and experience that their histories confirm.” | Lit Hub Photography
- Tim Queeney explores ropemaking, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Mocha Dick, the real life inspiration behind Herman Melville’s iconic white whale. | Lit Hub History
- “How are free people supposed to stay free? One short answer: don’t trust anyone over thirty.” On Thomas Paine’s guide to fighting dictatorship. | Lit Hub Politics
- Jane Ciabattari talks to Jessica Francis Kane about exploring the life of Penelope Fitzgerald through fiction. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “What had gone wrong with me didn’t start out with the car. It didn’t end with the car, but the car played a serious part.” Read from C. Mallon’s new novel, Dogs. | Lit Hub Fiction
From around the internet:
- On the existential horrors of storytelling through AI companionship. | Wired
- “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
- Riley MacLeod plays Tiny Bookshop, a bookstore management simulation game. | Aftermath
- “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
- Take a look at some of Mary Ruefle’s erasure texts, which she’s been making “almost daily” since 1998. | The Paris Review
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#aids epidemic#sex education#gaza#wb yeats#poetry#ukraine#tobias wolff#teenagers in their bedrooms#adrienne salinger#moby dick#herman melville#thomas paine#american history#penelope fitzgerald#new novel#new fiction#novel excerpt#prison abolition#tiny bookshop#ronald dahl#crypto bros#mary ruefle#literature#books#lit hub#literary hub#lit news#book news#publishing news#lit hub daily
August 5, 2025
Today, we’re revisiting Pynchon’s most underrated novel, reading books about sex and God, taking advice for literary translators, and more!
- Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland gets a 21st century reassessment: “…the plot is set in motion by Reagan’s slashing of the federal government, unwittingly severing millions of connections, setting in motion events beyond anyone’s control, resurrecting the suppressed.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Elaine U. Cho explains the process of building a fictional world around real Korean language and culture. | Lit Hub Craft
- Jon Raymond recommends books about sex and God by Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Theodor Adorno and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Tochi Eze recalls how Igbo folklore taught her that “all literature must be translated.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- m. mick powell highlights five essential books on Black queer friendship, including work by Toni Morrison, Brittany Rogers, and Danez Smith. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Megan Cummins explores why writers write about writers and how an artist’s relationship to creation can change over time. | Lit Hub Craft
- A new month means new books, and these 27 titles covering everything from the Brontës to Springsteen are out today! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “I’m smart, she thought. I have skills. Or, sort of. Maybe. The willingness, at least, to learn them.” Read from Emily Hunt Kivel’s debut novel, Dwelling. | Lit Hub Fiction
From around the internet:
- Leslie Jamison explores the dangerous impossibility of striving for perfection. | The New Yorker
- Riley MacLeod reads Moby-Dick on a boat (over a single day). | Aftermath
- “Do put all your eggs in a single basket if it is the most sublime basket you have ever seen, perfectly molded to the form of your eggs, I mean books.” Award-winning translator Lara Vergnaud offers some advice for pitching translations in a bleak market. | Words Without Borders
- Nicholas Boggs on writing James Baldwin’s life as a love story. | Vogue
- Adam J Smith considers Jane Austen’s role in the history of satire. | The Conversation
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#thomas pynchon#vineland#one battle after another#paul thomas anderson#korean language#reading list#book recommendations#black queer friendship#igbo culture#igbo#autofiction#writing about writing#new books#novel excerpt#new fiction#leslie jamison#perfectionism#moby dick#literary translation#james baldwin#jane austen#satire#literature#lit hub#lit hub daily#literary hub#reading#books#lit news#book news
- Paul Holdengraber calls Edwidge Danticat on the telephone, within minutes they’re talking all about death. | Literary Hub
- How Sophie Calle became an artist. | Literary Hub
- On the James Bond novel written by “Jonathan Franzen with a better sense of humour, a more concise Donna Tartt” (Kingsley Amis). | Hazlitt
- “There was only one thing we really had at the core of it: the death, the murder, the killing of my friend Prince Carmen Jones.” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s moving National Book Award acceptance speech. | Vulture
- “It made me want to throw up.” The rise of million-dollar bids on literary debuts. | The Wall Street Journal
- Strange house we must keep and fill: a poem by Tracy K. Smith. | The New Yorker
- “The whale as landfill. It was a metaphor, and then it wasn’t.” On watching a beached whale slowly suffer and die. | Granta
- “ATLiens made me love being black, Southern, celibate, sexy, awkward, free of drugs and alcohol, Grandmama’s grandbaby, and cooler than a polar bear’s toenails.” Kiese Laymon on discovering OutKast. | Oxford American
- “But what you really mean: it is you or I who always wants more.” Notes on love and violence. | Kenyon Review
- Facilitate more threads about David Foster Wallace: One brave troll’s quest to elevate Reddit conversations. | The Daily Dot
Also on Literary Hub: Blair Beusman barely survives 12 hours of Moby-Dick · Great novels written by poets · A brief, illustrated history of fog from Lauren Redniss · From Lindsay Hunter’s Ugly Girls, now available in paperback
#WhaleDay Giveaway!
In honor of #WhaleDay, we are giving out DICK: A card game, a Moby-Dick version of Cards Against Humanity. To win, play our social media version of it!
“Literary Hub is a go-to, daily source of ________.”
Pick a Moby-Dick quote to fill in the blank and hashtag it #LitHubDICK; the winners will receive a tote - get as obscure and creative as you want! You can enter here or on Twitter.
Happy hunting!