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Lit Hub Weekly

November 10 - 14, 2025

TODAY: In 1903, Tatsuko Hoshino, Japanese poet and founder of Tamamo, a haiku magazine exclusively for women, is born.

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The 2025 National Book Award Finalists answer our questions about their books, their reading habits, and their writing lives. | Lit Hub In Conversation

“The sickness that once detached him from life had now made him greedy for experience.” How Robert Louis Stevenson navigated a lifetime of chronic illness. | Lit Hub Biography

Maria Kunetsova remembers when the publishing industry gambled on her (and how she coped when she realized it lost). | Lit Hub Memoir

Boris Groys examines how Alexandre Kojève made sense of the nothingness of human existence. | Lit Hub History

“Let me initiate you into some of the mysteries that have come to plague me.” Jae Towle Viera considers the unexpected effects of reading to their child. | Defector

“When I was first told she had dementia, I was happy to learn she was not evil but merely sick.” Sujatha Gidla on caring for her mother. | Granta

Sarah Bochicchio reads postcards from Virginia Woolf. | The Paris Review

Hannah Goldfield revisits Anthony Bourdain’s seminal New Yorker piece, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” | The New Yorker

How fashion houses learned to embrace a literary aesthetic (or, how literature became cool again). | GQ

Matthew Gault reports on the small Michigan town fighting against an AI datacenter with connections to nuclear weapons. | 404 Media

“To its users, the web browser was a lovely tool. To its owners, it was a platform—a means of control, a system that locked users in and monitored their behavior.” James Gleick considers new books about the decline of the internet. | New York Review of Books

THE 2026 LUKAS PRIZES FOR NONFICTION

The Lukas Prizes honor the best in nonfiction book writing. Four awards are given annually, totaling $70,000. Now accepting entries through Dec. 4, 2025, at journalism.columbia.edu/lukas—no entry fee for the Work-in-Progress Awards!

Submit

“What appeared to be a single extrajudicial killing now looked like a program to eliminate Khalistani activists across North America.” Karan Majahan on the killing of a Canadian Sikh. | Granta

Bookstores across the country are setting up food banks to help SNAP recipients. | The New York Times

Jonathan Agin considers William Blake’s “radically anti-imperialist, counter-enlightenment spirit.” | Jacobin

Greg Hunter applies a late-style reading to the comics of Gilbert Hernandez. | The Comics Journal

Janus Rose explains why AI is the ultimate forced meme. | Aftermath

“Perhaps the only thing the Proud Boys and antifa have in common is their attachment to Fight Club and by extension to the Cacophony Society and SantaCon.” Chuck Palahniuk explains what went wrong with SantaCon. | Vulture

Moti Mizrahi examines the human desire to play God. | JSTOR Daily

In reading recent memoirs by Supreme Court Justices, Ruth Marcus learns how the idea of judicial restraint leads to radical outcomes. | The New Yorker

THE 2026 GEORGIA REVIEW PROSE PRIZE