Lit Hub Weekly: April 21 - 25, 2025

• Nick Ripatrazone remembers Pope Francis, one of the most literary leaders in the Vatican’s modern history. | Lit Hub Religion
• “There is no way to play three-dimensional chess with bigots.” Lydia Kiesling will not speak at an anti-trans university. | Lit Hub Politics
• Julien C. Levy pits Lucia Berlin and Raymond Carver head-to-head in a fight over who is the real patron saint of realism. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Gabrielle Bellot reads Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters and wonders if scientific innovation will be possible in Donald Trump’s America. | Lit Hub Science
• Rachel Monroe reports on what’s left of Outside. | The New Yorker

• Philipp Schönthaler considers the meaninglessness of corporate storytelling. | MIT Press Reader
• “Context is everything.” Nancy Naomi Carlson applies the idea of relative pitch to translation. | Poetry
• “Like most narratives of violence, rape stories tend to clot in the fissure between the aberrant and the banal.” Jamie Hood considers Gisèle Pelicot, Virginie Despentes, and the narratives of a post #MeToo world. | Bookforum
• Zach Rabiroff interviews Rebecca Burke, the 28-year-old cartoonist from Wales who was detained by ICE while visiting the United States on a tourist visa. | The Comics Journal
• “James’s observations can read like the mutterings of an insensitive middle-class man who doesn’t like seeing new neighbors move in down the block.” Scott Bradfield on Henry James’ strained relationship with his home country. | The New Republic
• Henri Cole on masculinity, AIDS, and knowing James Merrill. | The Paris Review
• Abdelrahman ElGendy interviews Sarah Aziza about generational trauma, living between languages, and her new book as a “reckoning with longing.” | The Baffler
• Scaachi Koul recounts the strange experience of reading an A.I.-generated biography of… herself. | Slate
• Scholar and translator Donald Rayfield details his personal, cultural, and political reasons for turning down a lifetime achievement award from Georgia’s Writers’ House. | Words Without Borders
• Martin Dolan considers Andrew Lipstein’s fiction and the cycle of  literary masculinity discourse. | The Point
• “Places like Iowa City often have scandalous reputations, particularly when embedded in red states. Yet that reputation sometimes stems not from bacchanalian excess, but rather from a refusal to accept the status quo.” Harry Stecopoulos on the poetry of Iowa City. | Public Books 
• Was this Montana woman the first enfant terrible of American letters? Hunter Dukes on “the wild woman from Butte.” | Public Domain Review
• “At some point in our acquaintance, he greeted me by kissing me fully on the lips, and from then on, this was our ritual, a smooch.” Jesse Barron on Gary Indiana and his final novel. | Granta
• José Olivarez and Jon Sands remember Aziza Barnes: “No one else sounds like them.” | Poetry

Also on Lit Hub:

The 2025 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction winners • Read three poems by Nasser Rabah and a forward by Mosab Abu Toha • Language and the art of self-translation • Elisha Cooper shares his creative routine • How a hockey childhood can lead to camaraderie and exclusion • Five books to read when your spouse is diagnosed with cancer • What it means to be a Palestinian writer today • The origin myths of Cuban refugee families • What to pack while visiting the Congo • Human fascination with the otherworldly octopus • The suffix “-ist” and writing in the present • The enduring power of Rumi • Preserving the world’s most endangered languages • The untold story of Rosemary Woodruff Leary • The church-state collaboration that sought to erase Native American cultures • Sisters Anne and Claire Berest on writing a novel together •  The beautiful simplicity of casual book club friendships • A deep dive into the history of the advice column • Steven W. Thrasher remembers Joseph Sonnabend • Lena Moses-Schmitt and Martha Park share an illustrated conversation • Good spaces still exist (and most of them are indie bookstores) • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • The evolution of the rattlesnake into an American symbol • Matthew Specktor remembers his mother’s fight to find her place in LA • The beauty and disappointment of toxic female friendships • Today on the Lit Hub podcast! • How caregivers disrupt the fiction of the nuclear family • The impact of our addiction to oil • The best reviewed books of the week • Doug Jones on community as a queer Black writer •  The “uncomfortable reality” of writing about the body