Lit Hub Weekly: August 17 – 21, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1904, Kate Chopin dies.

• What Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel can teach us about grief, literature, and growing up. | Lit Hub TV
• Why the tragedy of Jason Arday reflects a rigged game for today’s Black scholars. | Lit Hub Politics
• How environmentalism shows up in Ursula K. Le Guin’s fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Why does Walden resonate with modern Chinese youth? “Walden is not popular in China because Chinese readers misunderstand Thoreau. It is popular because they understand him precisely.” | Lit Hub On Translation
• R.K. Hegelman on Fernando Pessoa, “an extreme and singular figure in a modern poetic tradition that views poems not just as texts, but as gnostic vehicles of self-annihilation and worldly renovation.” | Poetry
• Ed Park on stamp collecting, maximum scrutiny, and his book, Three Tenses. | Broadcast
• Rebecca Ford takes a deep dive on what went wrong on the Children of Blood and Bone set. | Vanity Fair
• “We inhabit a world where the tendencies Hamlet embodied are magnified, and where opportunities for self-commentary are effectively continuous.” Anna Ballan on Freud in the age of therapy-speak. | The Hedgehog Review
• In case you need another reason to dump Amazon, the company is destroying books to train AI. | 404 Media
• Maria Adelmann reports on the crisis of the eternal adjunct. | The Nation
• Take a(n illustrated) stroll through the lost vocabulary of whaling, from greasy luck to blubber room. | Orion
• Lucy Ives presents a theory of Paul Celan: “Here is a wild proposition, then: Celan didn’t write in any language…he was writing in between languages.” | Poetry
• Nuncore is upon us: Paul Michael Johnson considers the new books, music, and other pieces of art and media fueling the culture’s fixation on nuns. | Public Books
• “A multi-racial, multi-gender coalition of mostly young people took to the streets demanding protection and investment in black life, and the best the country could do was to retire Aunt Jemima.” Mychal Denzel Smith on the legacy and exploitation of “Woke 1.” | Defector
• Geertje Bol considers the historical case for “righteous zeal” (stop being polite, start getting real). | Aeon
• Mark Bould interviews China Miéville: “All books end up to varying extents evading—exceeding—the bounds you’ve conceived of for them. This particular book did so more, and more dramatically, than any other book I’ve ever tried to write.” | Boston Review
• Lauren Michele Jackson on the reduction of Jason Arday: “Arday is dead and still being propped up as an example of various crises, by commentators unconcerned with his memory.” | The New Yorker
• Grace Byron, Dorothea Lasky, Philip Ball, and more write about astrology. | Broadcast
• Mitch Therieau explains the lure of “lore.” | The New York Times Magazine

Also on Lit Hub:

Jodi Picoult gets a tattoo • Learning about solidarity from Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk • New poetry by Rebecca Solnit • This week in literary history, Joseph Conrad becomes a British subject • The first New York Times review of All the King’s Men • 50 years of Flight to Canada • The problem with BMI • The surprisingly controversial history of the parenthesis • Edwidge Danticat answers our questions about literary life • Chiang-rae Lee talks to Jane Ciabattari  • Why Earl Swift hiked the Appalachian Trail twice • On publishing, careerism, and Laura McGrath’s Middlemen • Memoirs about wild swimming • Did smartphones really kill reading? • Books about women who rewrote life and art • Charles Darwin and his orchids • The sensitivity and perceptiveness of plants • Maris Kreizman is not a fan of your AI reading buddy • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • This week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • The idea of scientific progress versus what it means in practice • Learning about grief from the ghost of Sylvia Plath • On 10 years without Max Ritvo • The best reviewed books of the week • Why television is the serious writer’s ally • Mark Twain and the birth of mass media • Faraaz Mahomed talks to Damon Galgut