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!

On Lit Hub dot com:

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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Was Robert Walser the original art blogger? “Never before has an illustrator reproduced the flickering of a candle in so candle-like a manner, so flickery.” | Literary Hub
Meet the judges for the 2016 PEN Literary Awards. | Literary Hub
Not sure why so many authors lost so much writing, but here is another undiscovered story (by Edith Wharton). | The Atlantic
Thomas Pynchon’s earliest colonial ancestor wrote America’s first banned book, from which the modern reader “need only fear boredom.” | The Public Domain Review
Harrowing visions of the California dream rotting in the scorching sun: Reading Gold Fame Citrus in drought-afflicted Los Angeles. | Full Stop
“Othello may have started in conversation with Shakespeare’s definition of blackness, but today, he speaks with ours.” On race and identity in Othello. | Slate
On the origins of sequential art (or, less fancily, graphic novels). | Vulture
“Kanye, if only I could write a poem for you and not about you.” On Sarah Blake’s poetry collection Mr. West. | Rain Taxi
Evading persecution, capitalism, and arrogant knowingness: Does philosophy need to be obscure? | The Times Literary Supplement
Now that we’ve moved past the Baby Hitler dilemma: Should Mein Kampf be retranslated? | Forward

Also on Literary Hub: 30 questions for 30 writers attending the Miami Book Fair · Sheila Heti on the woman who changed her life · On creating a literary community in Pittsburg · An interview with this year’s charming National Book Award underdog, Karen E. Bender · More “spinglish” from the 323rd Republican debate · From Eli Horowitz’s The Pickle Index

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Debut novelists (and cousins!) Gabriel Urza and Sean Bernard on writing, family, and being Basque. | Literary Hub
Ursula K. Le Guin on not burning the past, insolent children, and craft that goes beyond “some little artisan putting the yeast in his handcrafted bread.” | Interview
A convoluted trail of bovine publishers leads us, perhaps, to a new Thomas Pynchon novel. | Harper’s
Seamus Heaney’s unpublished translation of Book VI of The Aeneid will venture up from the underworld. | The Guardian
Jonathan Franzen, a famous adversary of book clubs, has selected Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter for the one he is hosting. | The Wall Street Journal
Jesse Eisenberg sees writing and acting as similar (both involve “trying to understand the emotion underneath a character”) and different (“my stupid haircut is nowhere to be seen” in his debut collection). | Barnes & Noble Review
Artists over saints: on Truman Capote’s “elaborate self-portrait,” Music for Chameleons. | The Atlantic
Writing about the gross and the boring (marriage): an interview with Lauren Groff. | The Oyster Review
Today in the Best American Poetry debacle: the sister of Yi-Fen Chou condemns Michael Derrick Hudson’s “careless disregard for Chinese people” and Sherman Alexie expresses regret that it “has taken so much attention away from all of [the other] great poems.” Agreed on both counts. | The New York Times, BuzzFeed News

Also on Literary Hub: Charlie Brown as Gregor Samsa, on the 100th anniversary of The Metamorphosis · Ryan Berg namedrops all of our favorites: James Baldwin, William Maxwell, and Simon Le Bon · From Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Man Asian Literary Prize shortlisted Between Clay and Dust