August 6, 2025

Today, we’re looking into the future of small presses, making couscous fritters, reading books for David Lynch lovers, and more!

On Lit Hub dot com:

Elizabeth Cook examines the futures of small presses after the federal government’s “uncertainty, disrespect, and bullying” around NEA grants. | Lit Hub Politics
Khadijah Queen recalls the calm and stormy waters of writing poetry aboard a navel destroyer. | Lit Hub Memoir
“Yet those who grew up in Palestine remember this dish not with pity, but with deep affection as a flavor of comfort and a taste of home.” Sami Tamimi shares a modern take on Palestinian couscous fritters. | Lit Hub Food
Vanessa Roveto recommends books for lovers of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive by Marguerite Duras, Leslie Scalapino, Joyelle McSweeney, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
“In a broken world, Harold believed in that endless love.” Chronicling the horror and aftermath of the 1985 Georgia Church Murders. | Lit Hub History
Read “Black History Minute,” a poem by Harryette Mullen from the collection Regaining Unconsciousness. | Lit Hub Poetry
How linguistic archeologists link humanity through the shared origins of modern languages: “I find all this oddly comforting, the way these connections reveal how others before us have puzzled over their own experiences and tried their best to make sense of them.” | Lit Hub History
“Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one of the very best.” Read from Elaine Castillo’s new novel, Moderation. | Lit Hub Fiction

“We can hardly make sense of the idea of the end of the world without attending to all the other worlds that ended before our own.” Roy Scranton considers life in a perpetual apocalypse. | The Baffler
Niela Orr profiles Jamaica Kincaid, self-described “amateur writer.” | The New York Times Magazine
Tao Lin shares parts of his college diary. | The Paris Review
Sarah Brouillette considers Emma Cline’s resistance to trauma writing: “The trauma plot and the slut-shaming dossier are actually parallel formations, reveals The Guest.” | Public Books
“Good Mrs. Shakspaire, I beseech you to consider of the business [that] was left in trust [to] your husband by Mrs. Butts for the children.” Charles Nicholl examines what is (maybe) Anne Hathaway’s first known correspondence. | New York Review of Books
On the largely forgotten art of crafting artificial eyes. | The MIT Press Reader