April 7 – 11, 2025 ‹ Literary Hub

The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

TODAY: In 1826, Weber’s opera Oberon premieres in London.

Viet Thanh Nguyen explains why most American literature is the literature of empire. | Lit Hub Criticism
Eleanor Lanahan reflects on the literary legacy of The Great Gatsby, her grandfather’s timeless novel, as it turns 100. | Lit Hub Biography
Sarah Viren and Vauhini Vara discuss voice, tech, and the use of AI in writing. | Lit Hub In Conversation
Maris Kreizman asks what it means to be a good author when you publish a book. | Lit Hub Craft
“It starts with universities, because universities are this object of resentment and this kind of weird charisma, negative and positive.” Molly Fischer talks to Wesleyan president Michael Roth about how colleges should respond to Trump’s threats. | The New Yorker
Denise Lyons explores the role of libraries in disaster preparedness and recovery. | Library Journal
Skijer Huston considers the freeway novel, and “a literature of ambivalence.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
Elif Batuman profiles Sayaka Murata: “Instinctively, I grouped Murata with more radical and less nostalgic thinkers: people like Michel Foucault, who showed that so many supposedly biological or universal phenomena—madness, sex, criminality, medicine—are socially constructed.” | The New Yorker
“If it is helping them, does it matter if a bee knows it is sad?” Emily Polk considers bees and grief. | Emergence Magazine
What is there to learn from Trump’s Art of… books? John Ganz bravely revisits them to find out. | The Nation
Stephen Akey remembers working the telephone reference desk at the Brooklyn Public Library. | The Hedgehog Review
“If any of the politicians who are in support of banning books were to come into the store, we would love it. Because we would love to pile these books into their arms.” Gale Massey interviews Lauren Groff about her new bookstore, The Lynx. | Southern Literary Review
Amit Baishya and Siddhartha Deb discuss storytelling and “the weird Anthropocene.” | Public Books
Art Spiegelman remembers Jules Feiffer: “It’s a mongrel art—a mutt!—and every great master of comix must find a new way to use the distinct skills of writing and drawing to create a new way of transforming time into space.” | The Atlantic
Chris Heath dives into Robert Caro’s abandoned novel (about an intrepid journalist on a busman’s holiday). | Smithsonian Magazine
Edna Bonhomme considers Zora Neale Hurston’s lost epic, The Life of Herod the Great. | The Nation
Gita Jackson looks back at the tweet roundup era of blogging: “Non-fiction writing of all kinds is the same kind of illusion; this is why journalists often push back on the idea of ‘objectivity.’” | Aftermath
“Whose deviation from the standard is art, and whose is error?” Saudamini Deo on the reception of non-Western literature in the Western literary world. | Words Without Borders
Daphne Merkin considers Ruth Franklin’s new biography of Anne Frank, and what more there is to learn about the young diarist. | The New Republic