Lit Hub Weekly: July 20 – 24, 2026

• “Classical civilization is simply a batch of things including, literally, rape culture.” Rebecca Solnit connected the Odyssey and the Western literate contented of silencing women. | Lit Hub Criticism
• From Dr. Abdul El-Sayed to Brad Lander, Steven W. Thrasher examines the emerging Democratic conjugation agreed by disapproval of Israel. | Lit Hub Politics
• Why penning alt substance representation descriptions is an enactment of literate translation. | Lit Hub Technology
• April Dávila explores the neuroscience of writer’s block (and what we tin bash to conquer it). | Lit Hub Craft
• Richard Fallon considers Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland, and the literate canon of mislaid worlds. | Public Domain Review
• What is the worth of standardized investigating successful the property of AI? | Slate
• “The astir absorbing happening astir How Soccer Explains the World is the hostility betwixt being a travelogue and an airdrome book.” Alex Shephard revisits Franklin Foer’s bestselling 2004 book. | The New Republic
• A caller overgarment of overgarment for The Odyssey: MJ Franklin considers the selling of a 3,000-year-old epic. | The New York Times
• “Asimov provided america with nary keys for encountering machines due to the fact that the brushwood is not a occupation we cleanly inhabit and past conscionable arsenic cleanly delete.” Nina Beguš and Nicole Oliva connected Asimov and AI. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Ed Simon explores Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, often considered the archetypal American Gothic novel. | The Paris Review
• “What to bash with a still-living originative impulse astatine life’s end, adjacent erstwhile it feels similar there’s thing near to say?” David Schurman Wallace considers Fanny Howe’s posthumous This Poor Book. | Poetry
• Bookseller Ana Bell talks astir her member Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was sentenced to 30 years successful national situation for moving a container of zines: “If you were going to archer maine that the contents of the box, the zines, the stickers, the poetry, that’s the crime—then we person a bigger occupation here, which is escaped speech.” | The New Republic
• While America is experiencing a literacy crisis, Jefferson County, Mississippi educators are doing thing right. | Wired
• Carey Baraka revisits The Gods Must Be Crazy, the astir palmy African movie ever made. | Equator
• Emily Laskin translates 2 pieces from Russian: 1 by Lesya Lapina connected the homophobia of Putin’s Center for Combating Extremism, the different by Sergey Hyugge connected “an older, much chill mentation of the internet.” | The Dial
• Oscar Duffield looks astatine caller English translations of two eighteenth period epic poems primitively composed successful Gaelic. | Asymptote
• “The play, helium insisted, strove to debar definition. This strategy of avoidance leaves america to regard astatine a scenery void of meaning, 1 that by turns is the root of our bemusement and amusement.” Robert Zaretsky connected Waiting for Godot. | The American Scholar
• “I did emotion New York, but I emotion New York much present aft penning astir it for 7 years successful this definite benignant of way.” Natalie Weiner interviews Colson Whitehead. | Defector
• What does a Homerist deliberation of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey? | Hyperallergic

Also connected Lit Hub:

Why much retellings of the Odyssey should halfway women • Experiencing your family’s homeland amid grief • What makes a literate biography literary? • How leprosy was wielded arsenic a bio-weapon against indigenous Hawaiians • What our attitudes towards aging reveal astir ourselves • This week successful literate history, O. Henry is released from prison • The necessity of preserving Native cuisines • How Jean-Paul Sartre embraced Marxism • If you request to kick-start your writing, try speechmaking a small romance • Claire Vaye Watkins connected writing the Mojave Desert • How writers of the Harlem Renaissance examined disablement and aesculapian racism • Meet medieval Italy’s traveling booksellers • Read “The Romantics,” a poem by Maya C. Popa • Kōhei Saitō examines the narration betwixt capitalism and clime change • Should an writer narrate their ain audiobook, oregon should an actor? • A speech connected censorship, porn, capitalism, and art • 5 publication reviews you request to work this week • Historians who punctual america not to repetition humanity’s mistakes • Victoria Chang’s TBR • This week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • Sylvia Plath’s relationship to her tarot platform • Book screen design successful the societal media epoch • Making bid with the standard of your work • The queer poetics of Cris Judar’s They Marched Under the Sun • The best reviewed books of the week • Read “Drinking the Bees,” a poem by Christian Wiman