Aisling Walsh explores the 30-year legacy of His Dark Materials and its relevance during rising authoritarianism in the United States and beyond.
August 1, 2025
Today, we’re introducing new sci-fi, fantasy, poetry, and children’s lit! Also: Amy Silverberg’s TBR, the Promising Young Woman archetype, books out in paperback, and more!
- This month’s new sci-fi and fantasy titles feature sapphic vampires, robot ghost kitchens, and bloody exorcisms! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “Finding men who treated me with respect, like a human being instead of an object, was difficult, destabilizing; finding men who made me feel safe was nearly impossible.” Meg Pillow considers the legacy of actress Lana Clarkson and unpacks the archetype of the Promising Young Woman. | Lit Hub Criticism
- New works by Mariko Tamaki and Nicole Goux, Hailey Alcaraz, Daniela Kulot, and more are among the children’s books arriving in August. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Amy Silverberg is reading books by Rita Bullwinkel, Rebecca Lee, Marie-Helene Bertino, and more! | Lit Hub Criticism
- “If Vivian Gornick wrote fiction, it might look something like this.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Christopher Spaide recommends new collections by Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Heather Christle, bruno darío and other poets. | Lit Hub Poetry
- Books out in paperback this month include work by Elizabeth Strout, Kristopher Jansma, and Chelsea Bieker! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life.” Read from Amos Tutuola’s novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard. | Lit Hub Fiction
From around the internet:
- Read Marguerite Duras’s account of producing her 1979 film, Le Navire Night: “I believe the film was no doubt surplus, too much, thus unnecessary, useless.” | The Paris Review
- Henry Louis Gates Jr. examines Jamaica Kincaid’s radical penchant for “assuming the blackness of her characters without saying so.” | New York Review of Books
- John Waters, Art Spiegelman, Kate Bornstein and more on making banned art. | T Magazine
- Virginia Heffernan explores the ways in which Big Ten universities are standing up to Trump. | The New Republic
- Ed Park writes about Buffalo’s infamous Blizzard of ’77 and the board game it inspired, in which “travel is entirely local and maddeningly static.” | Graywolf Lab
- How journalist Jack Poulson discovered that two pieces of his writing had been delisted from Google search results. | 404 Media
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May 2, 2025
Today, we’re looking forward to this month’s new books, thinking about what it means to be a parent who writes about your kids, and feeling really angry about this whole capitalism thing!
- Leaving Twitter, publishing poetry, and talking about… men who read? All on the Lit Hub Podcast. | Lit Hub Radio
- Caroline Carlson recommends ten new universe-expanding children’s books. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- From Hell and drifting to the super gay, these new poetry collections are coming in May. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “Writing about Theo was—is—painful because it’s a distillation of my general anxiety, and at times shame, in turning my life into content.” Arianna Rebolini on being both a parent and a memoirist. | Lit Hub Craft
- This month’s SFF brings stories of queer futures, Golden Age sci-fi, and a romantasy take on what it really means to be a horse girl. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “The children woke coughing. Smoke hung above their beds, so they dropped beneath it, dressed lying down.” Read from Clea Young’s new story collection, Welcome to the Neighborhood. | Lit Hub Fiction
From around the internet:
- Zoe Dubno considers Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces and how capitalism makes us all miserable. | The Nation
- “Allowing re-creation of known stories by new authors gives these monsters an afterlife of their own, leaving lasting impacts on the genre for decades, or even centuries to come.” Olivia Pavao on the public domain as horror hero. | Public Books
- Gina Gagliano catches up with comics publishers four months after originally talking to them about the effects of Trump’s tariffs on their work. | The Comics Journal
- Tim Brinkhof on the relevance of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European to our authoritarian present. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Kevin Nguyen explores the life-changing power of interviewing your family. | The New York Times Magazine
- Sophie Gilbert and Amanda Hess discuss riot grrrl, Britney Spears, and the internet as a character. | Interview