Lit Hub Weekly: August 24 – 28, 2026

TODAY: In 1922, John Edward Williams is born.

• “Jason was not just hounded out of academia, he was hounded out of existence.” Steven Thrasher on the killing Jason Arday. ​| Lit Hub Politics
• Long live Dolly Parton, American icon, giver of books. | Lit Hub Biography

• Why Hieronymus Bosch’s otherworldly paintings reveal the artist’s “particularly pessimistic” way of thinking. | Lit Hub Art

• New data centers are threatening to destroy the natural beauty of West Virginia’s Canaan Valley. | Lit Hub Technology

• Accelerate, dog, accelerate! Elise Broach considers the strange rise of high-level STEM books for babies. | The New Yorker
• Carolyn Kellogg looks at the ambitious literature coming out of California presses Unnamed Press and Transit Books. | Los Angeles Times
• Alex Dueben explores how the poetics of Lettrism shows up in comics. | The Comics Journal
• Gazelle Mba recalls ”the poisonous exceptionalism that followed Black students and staff at Cambridge,” and the undermining of Black suffering that contributed to Jason Arday’s demise. | The Nation
• How deepfakes haunt educators in their own classrooms. | Wired
• The rise, fall, and rebirth of humanity in Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 speculative novel Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. | The MIT Press Reader
• Yiyun Li examines history and war through Qian Zhongshu’s novel, Fortress Besieged. | New York Review of Books
• “Armed with French theory, my adult self transformed this denial of sexual orientation into a progressive rejection of all categories and binaries.” David Sessions on the decline and fall of his lavender marriage. | The Point
• Malavika Kannan, Missouri Williams, and other authors with recent campus novels explore the appeal of setting a story in academia. | Cultured
• “They have literally any kind of book you could think of.” Emanuel Maiberg talks to an employee at the warehouse where Amazon scans and destroys books for AI training. | 404 Media
• Livia Gershon on getting to the bottom of boredom. | JSTOR Daily
• Tommy Orange profiles Thomas King and reflects on learning that a writer he looks up to isn’t actually Indigenous. | Vulture
• “What mattered, I learned from Ms. Parton, was that I led with the soul. What mattered, she modeled, were the stories I could tell. Everything else was mere packaging.” Xochitl Gonzalez on Dolly Parton’s unabashed femininity. | The Cut
• “But while Like Swimmers borrows the machinery of detective fiction, one of its primary concerns is the divide between fine art and popular art.” Marc Sobel on Dash Shaw’s newest graphic novel. | The Comics Journal
• Elizabeth Metzger looks at Franz Wright’s final poetry collection, “written from the realms of mental illness, addiction, religious conversion, and a weighty poetic lineage.” | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Surveillance technology and racial bias in policing • Why studying Goldilocks can produce emotionally resonant fiction • Writing the American West’s water crisis • The radical possibilities of empathy • How Christian nationalism rose in the United States • Our “implicit daylight bias”  • Read a poem by Antonella Anedda • Montserrat Roig’s Goodbye Ramona, a classic of antifascist Catalan literature • How America uses audio to mythologize itself • Jessica Sequeira on translating Vlady Kociancich’s The Eighth Wonder • Novels about obsessive athletes • Examining white girlhood through Anne of Green Gables • Why American bureaucracy gives time theft a new meaning • When your story’s hilarious (but it’s not supposed to be) • Try reading one of these novellas from cover to cover • Why don’t people write letters anymore? • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Elizabeth Letts on finding inspiration in her husband’s Moroccan family • This week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • Books that explore Elizabeth Taylor’s multifaceted life • On loving Elliott Smith • Wallis Wilde-Menozzi reflects on translating Antonella Anedda • How object narrators help humans see the world • August’s best reviewed books • How to situate your historical fiction in proper time and place • Mark Twain and the birth of mass media