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Lit Hub Weekly

September 28 - October 2, 2026

TODAY: In 1900, Thomas Wolfe is born.

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“Chalk it up to stubbornness. McGuane is as committed to his vision as his characters are to theirs.” Why Thomas McGuane is writing the most vital literature of the Trump Era.| Lit Hub Politics

Jason Bell recounts the secret three-man mission that won the Allies World War II. | Lit Hub History

What did Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot and Joan Didion really mean? On the histories of literature’s most famous lines. | Lit Hub Criticism

Marion Gibson traces the real story behind 17th-century England’s witchcraft panic. | Lit Hub Religion

A LIBRARIAN'S WAR

Meet Ray Trautman, the Greatest Generation's librarian, who made reading central to the Allied fight in World War II and transformed the role of books in American life.

Learn More

Reading Don Quixote is reminding me that at least a point of literature is to goof around.” Lincoln Michel on reading Cervantes’ masterpiece in 2026. | Counter Craft

RFK’s ethics filing (lol) reveals, among other things, that Skyhorse Publishing has paid him a whole lot of money. | NPR

Why do humans tell ourselves stories about dinosaurs? | Los Angeles Review of Books

A concerned group of writers—including Claire Messud, Amitava Kumar, Katie Kitamura, and Alexander Chee—have signed an open letter to the University of the South in protest of the abrupt termination of Leah Stewart, the director of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. | Sewanee Writers

Maya Man applies the lessons of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism to Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields music festival. | Dirt

Mahika Dhar explores the “fluid nonsensicality” of brainrot. | Public Books

Patrick Redford revisits the story of the Spine Collector, the low-stakes scammer who risked it all to pull one over on the publishing world. | Defector

MIN JIN LEE'S AMERICAN HAGWON

The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko's breathtaking, masterful family saga. “Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn't want to end.” –Roxane Gay

Read Now

Why the decline in literacy is directly linked to the decline of democracy. | Jacobin

Bartolomeo Sala reports from the first academic conference centering the works of Umberto Eco since his death. | The Dial

“I was struck by how many A.I. skeptics converged on the same formulation: what is this activity for?” Becca Rothfeld reports from the (surprisingly philosophical) Pro-Human Assembly. | The New Yorker

Chris Kraus, Ben Eastham, and Elvia Wilk on being both critics and fiction writers. | Cultured

Sarah Schulman reads Amy Littlefield’s Killers of Roe and considers the death of abortion rights in America. | Lux

Josh Lambert and Dan Sinykin dig into PEN America’s misleading claims about antisemitism in publishing. |