Lit Hub Weekly: March 24 – 28, 2025

TODAY: In 1958, Max Frisch’s dark comedy Biedermann und die Brandstifter (known in English as The Fire Raisers) premieres onstage at the Schauspielhaus Zürich.

• Maris Kreizman on Meta’s AI and how one of the richest companies in the world is stealing from the rest of us. | Lit Hub Technology
• Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya on how playing tennis helped manage her competitive tendencies while writing: “I do get frustrated at myself when I’m losing.” | Lit Hub Craft
• Jamie Hood defends the earnest, the sentimental, and those who still need to put their trauma into words in a post-#MeToo era. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Aaron Boehmer traces a history of underground presses and political dissent in America. | Lit Hub History
• Kaveh Akbar asks, in the wake of Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest by ICE, what will you do to protect those who are most vulnerable and targeted? | The Nation
• “I detect embers, even flames, of actual hope emanating from Gago’s writings, despite their theoretical density and the moral weight of her topics.” Amy Reed-Sandoval considers Verónica Gago’s feminist anti-fascism. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Inside Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar’s best friends book tour. | Vanity Fair
• Why is everyone reading Lonesome Dove all of a sudden? Michael Sebastian investigates. | Esquire
• “Call it aching, call it wrenching, call it shattering, but they are all wrong words, useless in their familiarity.” Yiyun Li meditates on fiction, death, and grief. | The New Yorker
• Joseph A. Howley on teaching King Lear at Columbia in the wake of Mahmoud Khalil’s kidnapping. | The Nation
• “The accusation that gender or gender theorists are a threat to women forgets that the issue of ‘gender’ has been central to feminist thought at least as far back as the work of Simone de Beauvoir in the late 1940s.” Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168. | London Review of Books
• Joyelle McSweeney digs into the first English-language translation of Tove Ditlevsen’s poetry. | Poetry
• “This brings the total number of journalists that Israel has killed in Gaza over the past year and a half to 206.” Remembering Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat. | Democracy Now!
• Laura Miller examines the staying power of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. | Slate
• Nicole Rudick examines what typeface has to do with the success of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby. | Broadcast
• Look inside the Joan Didion Papers at the New York Public Library. | Vulture
• “Daddy is from a place called Palestine, he said, in a lesson captured by my mother on the family’s camcorder.” Sarah Aziza on family history in Gaza. | The Paris Review
• “Kafka’s self-portrait is unimaginative, lifeless. Did he feel this about himself or was it poor artistry. How strange claiming that anything Kafka is not special.” Lynne Tillman takes a closer look at Kafka’s sketch of himself and his mother. | The Yale Review
• Bartolomeo Sala considers the relationship between farming and the earth in contemporary fiction and cinema. | The Dial
• “It’s useful to see The Aesthetics of Resistance as the literary equivalent of the films of Jean-Luc Godard.” Mitchell Abidor on dissidence and Peter Weiss’s three part novel. | Los Angeles Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Farid Matuk in conversation with Poets.org • On reading Maryse Condé’s Segu • The unrealistic idealism of first-love stories • The paradoxical mating habits of the Black Grouse • Battles waged across Europe and the United States during the Spanish Influenza • The joys of sharing the kitchen with children • Roxane Gay on expanding our understanding of contemporary feminist thought • Peter Trachtenberg examines icon Lorraine O’Grady’s literary artwork • On navigating the boundary between fact and fiction • The golden age of print magazines • How loss can help fuel a creative life • Kyle Seibel on attending the Gathering of the Kyles (in Kyle, Texas) •  Hannah Selinger on coining #Scandoval • The human tragedy of the refugee crisis • The rise of Amy Carlson’s New Age internet cult • On fandom, K-pop, and Korean-American identity • How to model your wardrobe after David Bowie • Capturing the human feeling of disaster in writing • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • The life and art of Nezahualcóyotl • Reductive meta-storylines about women’s writing • The early European career of a future NBA legend •  Our 13 favorite March book covers • New on the Lit Hub Podcast • House of Anansi Press’s classic guide to immigrating • Writing in the footsteps of Pina Bausch • The 25 titles out in paperback this April • March’s best reviewed books • The literary film and television coming to a streaming service near you • The most anticipated audiobooks in April