TODAY: In 1943, Nikki Giovanni is born. 

• Evelyn McDonnell on the ethics of Notes to John, commercial exploitation, and the selling of Joan Didion’s privacy. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “Ants deserve more poems.” Hannah Brooks-Motl praises poetry about insects by John Clare, William Blake, David Seung, and more. | Lit Hub Craft
• Maris Kreizman wants to know: Why are there so many new June books? | Lit Hub Book News
• Molly Jong-Fast remembers a devastating week of loss, diagnoses, and unlearning lessons. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Branden Jacobs-Jenkins goes deep on the craft of overhauling his Pulitzer-winning play. | New York Magazine
• “It’s about falling for someone and then wistfully and willfully losing that someone, while also trying to invent a spatial distribution of the soul that would allow one to feel connected to that person but also alone.” Claudia Durastanti on Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Separate Rooms. | The Paris Review
• Paul North on the end of the American empire and Karl Marx’s essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “I wish, like I wish all writers in Africa, to hunt with African language—with African words.” A final interview with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. | The Nation
• Teachers discuss the devastating consequences of student AI use in their classrooms. | 404 Media
• In defense of adverbs (seriously). | Counter Craft 
• Adelle Waldman shows some love for Northanger Abbey, Austen’s least beloved novel. | The New Yorker
• “All notions of untranslatability depend in fact on the fallacy that ‘perfection’ is an ideal that translations should aspire to and be judged by.” Geoffrey Brock on the trouble with focusing on what gets lost in translation. | Poetry
• Jessica Taylor considers the similarities between writing romance and academic research. | Public Books
• “Isn’t it possible that dispatching a 21st-century writer to Paris to tramp along in Twain’s wake might enhance the modern reader’s appreciation of Twain’s work by proxy? It’s certainly not impossible.” Caity Weaver attempts to follow in Mark Twain’s (Parisian) footsteps. | The Atlantic
• Michael Bobelian considers the renewed relevance of Arthur Derounian’s best-selling 1943 exposé of the United States’ Nazi underworld, Under Cover, which “served as a wake-up call for his contemporaries and a permanent record of the reactionary forces lurking just beneath the surface of the world’s oldest democracy.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Madeleine Watts revisits the hypnotic nature of Antigone Kelefa’s The Island. | The Nation
• “That’s what we lost: the symphony of a mind that contained us all.” Christopher Bollen on his friend, Edmund White. | Vulture
• Marilyn Robinson considers life in an occupied America. | New York Review of Books
• “Whether we call Lorelei too fast and loose or a little slow on the uptake, we do so with the fantasy of finding truth in speed.” Jeewon Yoo revisits Anita Loo’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. | Public Books 

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Why similes are having a moment in new poetry collections • New children’s books that promise fantastic adventures • The medicinal plants of the Adirondacks • June’s best new sci-fi and fantasy • The hard-won defeat of runner Steve Prefontaine’s Olympic debut • How the “Unite the Right” rally altered American politics • The anti-gay censorship laws in 1980s Britain •  The 26 new books out now! • Sports books that go beyond the mechanics of the game • Susan Choi on writing her novel, Flashlight • The memories that chase us during the holiday season • Ocean Vuong’s keynote speech from the 2025 Whiting Awards Ceremony • Melissa Febos documents her year of celibacy • What do Americans want to read? • Applying a fiction writing background to the art of biography • What Mike Tyson learned from his mother • The history and practice of high-end luxury • Books that explore deep time • On Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive?  • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • The existential fight to enshrine civil rights in the Constitution • Looking at Kate Briggs’s TBR! • Jeremy Atherton Lin on writing love and politics •  The first (forgotten) non-stop trans-Atlantic flight • Rediscovering creative expression after singing for the last time • The tension and creativity of fictionalizing the Armenian Genocide •  Prison literature and the state-led suppression of language • Dwyer Murphy interviews Megan Abbott • The best reviewed books of the week • Novels about family secrets • “Poetics,” a poem by Aaron Shurin • A guide for aspiring authors of nonfiction • On hearing the voice of the natural world