May 15, 2025
Does the Supreme Court just run on vibes??? Are you an asshole if you don’t support your friend’s self-published novel??? Is Substack a viable platform for fiction? The answers to these questions and more are on Lit Hub dot com!
- Leah Litman explains the legal theories weaponized by conservative justices (or, does the Supreme Court just run on vibes now?) | Lit Hub Politics
- “I refuse to support my friend’s crappy self-published novel: Am I the literary asshole?” | Lit Hub Advice
- On gender, power, and the life of Fu Hao, ancient China’s axe-wielding warrior queen. | Lit Hub History
- “It took me a few more years to take pride in the voice I had honed through the books and magazines my father and I had found in bargain bins and open-air stalls.” Monica Macansantos on reuniting with her father through used books. | Lit Hub Bookstores
- “She takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf, all masters of the repressed and unsayable.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Jessica Levine grapples with maternal rage and the complexities of release and forgiveness. | Lit Hub Memoir
- How cultural exchange across Europe and Asia contributed to the development of language: “By 4500 BCE, the physical and genetic barriers that had divided Eurasian populations for tens of thousands of years had begun to come down, but a new divide had opened up.” | Lit Hub History
- “The room feels like the base of a cheesecake. Sylvie sits down, rolls up her shirtsleeves, looks at the box of tissues.” Read from Adelaide Faith’s novel, Happiness Forever. | Lit Hub Fiction
From around the internet:
- Tessa Hulls on her Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts. | Seattle Times
- Peter C. Baker considers the novels of Substack: “[the platform’s] literary influence, if it ends up having any, might come less from the fiction that is published there and more from the platform’s role as a new hub for people interested in literature and its possibilities.” | The New Yorker
- Timothy Aubry returns to the books he loved as “an aspiring intellectual”—also known as “the white male middlebrow canon.” | The Point
- David Richardson, the new acting administrator of FEMA, is also bad at writing novels. | The New Republic
- “But on one issue, Leo is clear. He is not a supporter of the Trump regime or of the large body of rich and conservative American Catholics who wish to make themselves heard.” Colm Tóibín on American Catholicism and what Pachamama means to the papacy. | London Review of Books
- Why journalism schools (and their students) are at a precarious political crossroads. | The Nation