Lit Hub Weekly: September 29 - October 3, 2025

• “Laying someone to rest is the final act of care that leaves a lingering impression, not only on the dead, but on you.” Eden Royce on the importance of funerary details in the face of grief. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Kate Colby on drawing inspiration from Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning and how poetry can save the human brain. | Lit Hub Art
• Emily J. Orlando explores Taylor Swift’s Pre-Raphaelite era: “Swift seems to be identifying with, and forcefully reimagining, this tragic figure from Victorian history.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• “I do not think love comes easily to me—love for people, that is. For cats, who have been accused of loving back too little or not at all, it is a different story.” Rebecca van Laer on what humans can learn from our relationships with cats. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Tajja Isen considers publishing’s gambling problem: “There is tremendous pressure to succeed from the beginning. If they fail, all bets are off, sometimes literally.” | The Walrus
• “Reading them in the bright quiet of morning, with an attentive child, feels like childhood itself.” Nausicaa Renner on the children’s series Sato the Rabbit. | The New Yorker
• Arthur C. Clarke, scuba diver? On the author’s overlooked underseas adventures. | JSTOR Daily
• Andrea Bartz details her lawsuit against A.I. company Anthropic, “an opening gambit in a critical battle that will be waged for years to come.” | The New York Times
• Three newly unearthed Virginia Woolf stories will be published for the first time next month. | The Guardian
• “We humans are imperfect and imperfectable, but sometimes it is those imperfections that are our greatest asset, particularly if we are capable of recognizing those imperfections.” John Warner on A.I. and “bullshit writing.” | The Biblioracle Recommends
• “The people working on this stuff don’t even seem to believe their own bullshit.” Why AI will never serve democracy. | The Baffler
• Patricia Lockwood and Emmeline Clein talk about writing in the attic, literary tropes, and Jesus’s vagina-shaped wound. | Cultured
• Jane Stern breaks down the language of apartments. | The Paris Review 
• “There is no medical training for this, no papers to help guide me – nor should there be.” Mina Naguib documents the impossible choices of providing medical care in Gaza. | Granta
• Jessiva Olin explores the Amanda Knox media-industrial complex. | London Review of Books
• What does prestige even mean now when it comes to television? “Flash forward 10 years. The bubble has burst…” | Public Books
• “The postcolonial future would, more often than not, be ruled by Mobutus, not Lumumbas.” Sandipto Dasgupta on the life and work of “anticolonialist luminary” Andrée Blouin. | Boston Review
• Ashley Stimpson on the beauty and resilience of swamplands, and the importance of protecting them. | Longreads
• “This AI slop is just harvesting the remnants of legacy journalism, insulting the legacies of the dead and intellectually impoverishing the rest of us.” When AI-generated biographies capitalize on death and grief. | 404 Media

Also on Lit Hub:

Re-envisioning a classic Gertrude Stein cover • The art of creating a dictionary • The hidden history of power, privilege and violence behind a 19th-century photograph • 10 translated titles that uplift Ukrainian voices • How Picasso saved Matisse’s paintings from Nazi art thieves • What do we learn from mythology? • September’s best book covers are here • Literary film and television you need to stream in October • The 10 best books on permaculture • Who actually was Mary? • October’s most anticipated new audiobooks • Some spooky season SFF • 10 new children’s books • Sophie Blackall and DiCamillo on collaborating on a children’s book • Memory, language, and love in Germany • Emma Straub talks to Lily King • Navigating the fact and fiction of alien abduction stories • Mariana Enriquez on burying Argentina’s disappeared • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • What’s on Anton Hur’s TBR? • China’s new wave of bookstores • Sarah Viren talks to Alex Niemi • New poetry collections coming in October • The best reviewed books of the week • The environmental cost of green capitalism • Answers to (impossible) questions about American democracy • Queer life in Abu Dhabi • The power in imagining your ideal reader