TODAY: In 1879, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley” is published in Chambers’s Journal.  

• From migrants and colonizers to gossip and war, Emily Wilson examines The Aeneid and its relevance to the modern world. | Lit Hub Craft
• Logan Karlie explores the literary afterlives of Labyrinth and the liminal space between dreams and reality. | Lit Hub Film
• Devoney Looser explores the enduring appeal of Elizabeth Bennet, Austen’s most beloved heroine. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Maria Reva, Jasmin Schreiber, and Ed Yong discuss the inspiration of snails, ecological grief, and why “nihilism is a luxury we truly cannot afford right now.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Richard Grant visits Cormac McCarthy’s personal library, two years after the author’s death. | Smithsonian Magazine
• “Her white is not only luminous but also blinding. Empty, but filled to the point of overwhelm. It is a frequency too saturated to parse.” Dashiel Carrera considers whiteness in sleep, the Velvet Underground, and Han Kang’s latest novel. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• What John Updike got wrong about the aftermath of Katrina: “Maybe it wouldn’t have been worth it to criticize his imperfect or, frankly, lazy and racist analysis.” | Oxford American
• Devoney Looser discusses the wild and wonderful world of Janeites. | Public Books 
• “Oliver is bracingly, uncommonly honest about her fear that she might be a loser.” Maggie Millner considers Mary Oliver and shame. | The Yale Review
• From his 1982 book Abusing Science, Philip Kitcher critiques creationism in classrooms and explains the dangers of calls for rhetorical balance. | The MIT Press Reader
• Viola Zhou explores her mother’s relationship with her AI doctor, Dr. DeepSeek. | Rest of World
• “The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass.” Ed Simon and Jill Lepore talk about the Constitution. | Pittsburgh Review of Books
• Lydia Pelot-Hobbs discusses prison abolition after Katrina: “We often talk about the state as if it’s a monolith, instead of as a multi-scalar and contradictory assemblage of institutions.” | n+1
• “It’s basically the only place on the internet that doesn’t function as a confirmation bias machine.” On net neutrality and the editorial standards of Wikipedia. | The Verge
• Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviews Arundhati Roy: “I might be a writer with whatever is conventionally known as success. But the things I write about and the people that I write about are being beaten, even as we speak today.” | The New York Times Magazine
• Robert Aman interviews Ilan Manouach, “our twenty-first century Marcel Duchamp.” | The Comics Journal

Also on Lit Hub:

An open letter from an editor in Israel • Depressing books that could cheer you up • 10 great children’s books in September • What we can learn from books we don’t like • This month’s new poetry • Natalie Zutter highlights fall sci-fi and fantasy • Jane Ciabattari talks to Joan Silber • The 20 new books out today • The uncanny soullessness of AI-narrated audiobooks • Are Americans being conditioned to accept delayed elections? • On writing about the abuses of the American immigration system • Adedayo Agarau documents years of ritual killings in Nigeria • Read “Toni Morrison,” a prose poem by Nikki Giovanni • The complexities of grief, guilt, and memory • Essential literary film and television coming this fall • Fighting horror and finding hope as slaughter in Gaza continues • Eliana Ramage recommends literature about ambitious women • I can’t let go of a ten-year-old literary grudge… Am I the asshole? • Translating Grave of the Fireflies for a new era • Can siblings make a literary dream team? • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Helen Garner on going all in for her grandson’s footy club • On Kevin Young’s TBR • Lalla Romano’s ahead of its time masterpiece, In Farthest Seas • Leila Chatti wrestles with not writing • The tennis player and the writer • The Lit Hub Podcast is getting spooky! • Forging friendship through writing community • The best reviewed books of the week • On the secrets of the omniscient narrator •  Writing a novel inspired by the work of France’s de-miners • Emily Meg Weinstein on rock climbing and saving herself