Lit Hub Weekly: October 19 – 23, 2026

• Meet the authors shortlisted for the 2026 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Was Cormac McCarthy that feline successful your MFA? | Lit Hub Craft
• We promise: you really don’t request a smartphone. | Lit Hub Technology
• On Irish legend’s dangerously seductive fairies, the beguiling aes sidhe. | Lit Hub History
• “Plath described and wrote herself into the unit of her ain century. She is present portion of the grounds of the unit of our own.” Kristin Grogan considers caller collections of Sylvia Plath’s writing. | Boston Review
• What truly makes a atrocious literate adaptation bad? | The Walrus
• Sarah Stankorb considers the tradwives who are deconstructing: “They are a motion that gender-based authoritarianism is unsustainable, adjacent among the biggest advocates for women’s submission.” | Slate
• Sarah Clegg digs into the amazingly heavy roots of romantasy. | The Guardian
• Arundhati Roy explores AI arsenic capitalism’s last form: “The oligarchs bash look to judge successful their extinction communicative – astatine slightest capable to person built themselves bunkers astatine the acold ends of the Earth stocked with water, nutrient and ammunition. But extinction is not what they are selling the remainder of us.” | Equator
• How journalists—including those astatine Wired—were fooled by Elizabeth Holmes. | Wired
• Hannah Goldfield digs into Louise Glück’s passionateness for restaurants. | The New Yorker
• One of the spookiest (and astir famous) penning competitions successful history gave america some Frankenstein and The Vampyre. | JSTOR Daily
• “She was reaching women I would ne'er know. This, I thought, was however societal alteration truly occurred.” Vivian Gornick remembers Gloria Steinem. | The Baffler
• “You wage attraction to his attention.” A.O. Scott connected John Berger’s antidote to the infinite scroll. | The New York Times Magazine
• “But however bash you alteration minds? Tsai, Chang, and Chiang each responded the mode 1 would expect bookstore owners to: the transformative powerfulness of reading.” Kelly Kong reports connected Taiwan’s “bookstore revolution.” | The Nation
• Willis Jenkins remembers Wendell Berry, “the farmer-prophet of agrarian Kentucky.” | The Hedgehog Review
• Izabella Scott traces the literate past of dildos. | The Paris Review
• “In respective descriptions of these amateur events, including immoderate of his own, Hemingway sounds little similar a matador than a rodeo clown.” On Hemingway’s beef with bullfighting writer Barnaby Conrad. | The New Yorker
• What happened to Scientific American? Emmet Fraizer investigates the uncertain aboriginal (and messy caller past) of the beloved subject publication. | The Nation

Also connected Lit Hub:

When you deliberation of the Brontës, deliberation of botany • Essential speechmaking connected Chinese American history • Why are nameless narrators nameless? • How Joseph Luzzi recovered inspiration successful his mother’s storytelling • On the increasing relation of memoir successful the academy • Why the Confederacy was a fake federation • Writing astir Syria’s Uyghur community arsenic a Chinese-American • Step aboard the Hindenburg earlier catastrophe struck • Navigating the American wellness security system arsenic a writer • The real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes • The value of John Berryman’s Shakespeare lectures • The bookselling roar that developed Britain’s modern literate culture • American classrooms are segregated, and AI is lone makes it worse • Nina Chayka searches for the rarest Nabokov paperbacks successful America • How 2 sisters built a movie theatre for the children of Gaza • Channeling the unit of achromatic supremacy into art • How the Communist Party of China became the astir palmy governmental enactment successful the world • Read “Elevation,” a poem by Lindsay Turner • There volition ne'er beryllium another Wikipedia • Tanaïs takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire • Are you the asshole if you deliberation books are over? • Three caller books that analyse Joe Biden’s enactment for Israel • 5 publication reviews you request to work this week • This week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • Why are we truthful uneasy about pubic hair? • The Puritans’ bequest and the contradictions of American power • What broiler chickens reveal astir the Anthropocene • How penning fabrication astir Palestinian lives allows stories to unrecorded connected • Why your penning soundtrack matters • The best reviewed books of the week • It’s 1961, and you’re seeing Nina Simone unrecorded astatine the Village Gate • Otherness, the acheronian of the past, and drafting inspiration from The House of Seven Gables • Read “At the Dinner Table astatine Night,” a poem by Allen Guy Wilcox