Lit Hub Weekly: September 7 – 11, 2026

TODAY: In 1846, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning elope.

• A new season means new books. Here are 34 titles you need to read this fall. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Emily Wilson talks to Leanne Ogasawara about “the high stakes and complexities of translation,” complicated men, and her essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea. | Lit Hub On Translation
• “Language is something that is practiced and learned and something that you can be awful at, and also something that you can get better at. But the only way that you get better is by making mistakes.” R.F. Kuang talks to Adam Dalva. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Alexander Lee examines Jewish history and identity in Europe via the ghetto of Venice, from his Cundill Prize-shortlisted The First Ghetto. | Lit Hub History
• When does the world need your words, and when does it need your action? Should you go to that organizing meeting or meet your deadline? Steinem lived these tensions, wrestling with them and, sometimes, writing about them.” Maggie Doherty on Gloria Steinem’s life in writing and activism. | The New Republic
• What does a MrBeast/James Patterson collaboration look like? Strange, and bad, but nevertheless: a book! | Slate
• Is the internet really killing literature, or has it expanded it? Aarthi Vadde explores the potential of the literary web. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Dónal Gill wonders: could Jonathan Swift be the antidote to generative AI? | The Dial
• “Moby-Dick, from the moment the pale Usher pops up, frames itself with—or, indeed, as—a parable of document supply, of transformation of the natural world’s bounty into quartos, folios, lexicons, and, of course, novels.” Tom McCarthy on Melville and the white page. | The Yale Review
• Anthropic actually wants to “destructively scan” as many books as possible, it turns out. | The New Yorker
• “Genocide is not just the destruction of a people, it is also the obliteration of that people’s store of memories and, with it, the destruction of their ability to see themselves historically.” J.M. Coetzee and F.M. Siccardi reflect on growing up in the shadow of colonial genocide, in South Africa and Argentina, respectively. | Equator
• Lucy Sante’s encounters with famous writers, from the “highly esteemed but not famous Joe Sacco discusses Gaza, comics journalism, and hanging out with ordinary people. | Jacobin
• Is The Legend of Zelda queer-coded? It’s not not queer-coded. | JSTOR Daily
• Federico Perelmuter considers Carolyn Forché and the future of poetry of witness in a world increasingly “razed into horror and multifarious catastrophe.” | Poetry
• Daniel Lukes explores manga, misogyny, and the erotic grotesque via Shintaro Kago’s Brain Damage. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Check out the cover for American Occupation, a forthcoming document of Minnesota’s resistance to ICE • The hazards of over-identifying with your job • This week in literary history, William S. Burroughs kills Joan Vollmer in a drunken party game • Wiemar Germany’s theater and artistic expression in the shadow of fascism • Advice on teaching high school from Frank McCourt • The legal history of anti-Chinese racism in America • The winners of American Short Fiction’s 2026 Insider Prize • On struggling to write your own grief • What peatlands tell us about time • Stef Ferrari recommends incredibly earnest novels • If your partner hates reading, should you dump them? • Why the US constitution was designed to be amended • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • This week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • How observation deepened the relationship between Anna Heyward and her dog • Why Marian Anderson loved Schubert • Where does Harlan Coben get ideas? • The lore and legacy of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” • No God But Us, The Sense of Brown, and the aftermath of 9/11 • On the demonization of Palestinian kites • The forgotten enslavement of Native Americans in the United States • The best reviewed books of the week • Autofiction, shame-based writing, and being an unreliable narrator • Read “Late Summer in the Anthropocene,” a poem by Marcus Wicker