Lit Hub Weekly: September 14 – 18, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1956, The First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists meets at the Sorbonne in Paris; organized by the publishing house Présence africaine, the Congress features speakers Richard Wright, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon.

• Don’t have time to read all those fall reading lists? That’s okay. We read them for you. Here’s the Ultimate Fall Reading List. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• How raising a multilingual child taught Bo Wang to seamlessly incorporate English and Mandarin into her fiction. | Lit Hub Craft
• Kevin Dettmar explores the tragic history behind one of post-punk’s most iconic tracks: “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” | Lit Hub Music
• Who says nonfiction is in crisis? Maris Kreizman recommends 14 nonfiction titles to look forward to in the remainder of 2026. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “We can’t help but love our own country, because in refusing it affection, in hating it, we can’t help but hate ourselves.” Ivan Kenneally on Mark Twain’s patriotism. | The Hedgehog Review
• Sophie Gilbert explores the world Jackie Collins imagined. | The Atlantic
• Krithika Varagur goes to Bayreuth, the century and a half old opera festival created by and featuring the works of Richard Wagner: “Something had certainly happened to me. Just a week prior, I had been unsure if I even liked Wagner.” | The Paris Review
• “If we ever reached a point of total automation, Weil argued, humans would destroy themselves out of boredom and restlessness.” Meghan O’Gieblyn on what Simone Weil and Arthur Schopenhauer understood about the individual. | New York Review of Books
• Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor go deep on Trump’s AI obsession. | Cultured
• Making chatbots generate fiction about your “hyper-specific personal fantasies” instead of just writing it yourself is loser behavior, actually. | Wired
• “A child can look intensely engaged while being given very little time to think.” Natalia Kucirkova considers the empty chaos of children’s media. | Aeon
• Emma Claire Foley remembers late writer and historian Carol Ginzburg. | The Baffler
• Gabe Bullard explores the cost of our hunger for frictionless food. | Longreads
• A group of academics have constructed an archive to remember the Palestinian scholars murdered in the Gaza genocide. | Public Books
• “We navigate the world by means of a tiny ocean enclosed within our heads”: A psychoanalytic history of the sea. | Pioneer Works
• Francesca Giangiulio considers Anthony Bourdain’s recently reissued crime novels. | Salon
• Beth Blum revisits the story of Love Story author (and Yale classicist) Erich Segal, whose “tortured academic love story offers a historical window onto the ongoing tension between academic and popular taste.” | Chronicle of Higher Education
• “Taken together, these films constitute a sensationalistic reckoning with the grim legacy of Southern culture in the United States.” Eileen Jones considers the Southern Gothic in cinema and literature. | Jacobin
• H.M.A. Leow traces how pop music in Cambodia survived the Khmer Rouge. | JSTOR Daily

Also on Lit Hub:

If your town needs a book store, you should start one • Writing real and imagined lives in and outside of prison • Rabih Alameddine on writing humor in tragic times • This week in literary history, John Keats writes “To Autumn” • The most anticipated mysteries, thrillers, and crime novels coming this fall • All the literary film and TV coming to streaming this season • The detrimental nature of convenience • Emily St. John Mandel talks to Jane Ciabattari • The Orientalism of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy • On coming to terms with modern Russia • How does Madeleine Thien organize her bookshelves? • Family, identity, and being a Korean adoptee in the United States • Authors with new books answer our questions about literary life • Who actually benefits in an MFA workshop? • What UFO fanaticism reveals about American conspiracies • How white supremacist literature spreads in prisons • Lydia Mathis recommends books about the body • Abdelrahman ElGendy on the Egyptian prison poem that gave his memoir structure • Human coding in the age of AI • Remembering Robert Redford, movie star and conservationist • On the power of saying “no” as a woman • On writing about the opioid crisis and losing loved ones to addiction • Book recommendations (for strangers from the internet) • Books about the Great American Road Trip starring people of color • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Remembering Anna May Wong • Nine collections of breakup poetry • When sex ed is insufficient, can romance novels pick up the slack? • Janet Manley interviews 2026 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Winner Jon Klassen • How Isabel Allende transformed a letter to her grandfather into a novel • On how we recognize evil (assuming it exists) • The best reviewed books of the week • On translating Roberta Recchia’s debut novel

Featured image: Florocky, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons