Lit Hub Weekly: July 13 – 17, 2026

TODAY: In 1811, William Makepeace Thackeray is born.

• On the rise (and fall) of the Japanese cell phone novel in the early 2000s (and the its attendant moral panic). | Lit Hub Technology
• Josh Cook, bookseller and founder of the Porter Square Review of Books, explores why booksellers are stepping in as book criticism disappears. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• “Put simply, people don’t buy books. They buy holograms, and they hope the book matches up.” What happens when the idea of a book supersedes the book itself in the eyes of readers. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Steven W. Thrasher on why we must all fight for academic freedom in the face of institutional cowardice and government overreach. | Lit Hub Politics
• “There have been more than a few times lately when I wanted to throw my laptop across the room, drop everything, and go live in the woods. This was one of them.” Monica Potts confronts the extent of AI theft of her work. | The New Republic
• Even if Sarah Wynn-Williams was supposed to stay silent, Meta still looks like a bully “pursuing a personal agenda.” | Wired
• Nitsuh Abebe explores the rising (“almost camp”) use of “degenerate.” | The New York Times Magazine
• “As we look upon burned flesh in Gaza, we are also seeing the rubble of this older version of Western empire. How best to splice the frame, to keep them both in mind, to keep looking?” Isabella Hammad on Gaza, ruin, and mourning. | Equator
• David Cole considers the ruling against Florida’s Stop WOKE Act. | New York Review of Books
• Katie Kitamura tells Ann Tashi Slater about the importance of staring out the window. | Tricycles.
• Ali Rıza Taşkale considers Silicon Valley’s misuses of science fiction. | Aeon
• Hassan Abo Qamar on watching the World Cup in Gaza: “For 90 minutes, the World Cup gives us something the genocide has tried to take away: a sense of community, a sense of normality, and a moment of pure celebration.” | The Nation
• “Tokens…acquire functional value relationally, through learned patterns of difference and contextual association, rather than through any intrinsic bond between word and thing.” What semiotics has to do with the development of LLMs. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “They just heard me explaining that the odds are actually quite good in Russian roulette.” Jacob Russell writes a dispatch from Beirut. | The Paris Review
• Cristina Dorador writes a love letter to the Atacama Desert amid climate change, translated by Robin Myers. | The Dial
• Hua Hsu revisits Shiva Naipaul’s newly-reissued 1980 account of Jonestown, Journey to Nowhere, which “interrogates not just good and evil but reverberations through time: the bruising force of personality, a politics scaffolded on the maddest of promises, our tendency to mistake charisma for wisdom.” | The New Yorker
• Pasquale Toscano examines the Odyssey through the lens of disability (and American politics). | Public Books
• Geraldine Brooks on the genesis and impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. | Smithsonian Magazine
• “The onus is not on the readers. The onus is on publishers and prize committees and all the other forces that determine which books remain visible over time.” How Doubleday’s new reissue series, Outsider Editions, is expanding the canon. | Language Arts

Also on Lit Hub:

The queer writer’s experience of sobriety • Intimacy as art in Eric Rohmer’s Élisabeth • Why writers need to steal time • How Grace Paley imbued the roles of artist and activist with love • The “nostalgic glamour” of reading other people’s letters • Eric Olson profiles Sigrid Nunez on the release of her collection • Angela Flournoy explores Jean Said Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments • Trying to capture the lives of children in a Syrian detention camp • Authors with new books answer our questions about literary life • Books that center messy love • When one of your poems is literally going to the Moon • Why raccoons love Toronto • The magical case for following your literary dreams • Stories of America’s unsung outdoorswomen • The dangers of forgetting the environmental history of our planet • Why Phoebe’s the real icon in The Catcher in the Rye • How Israel turned Gaza into an “annihilation zone” • Jealousy rears its ugly green head in this week’s Am I the Literary Asshole? • What the poetry of Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska teaches us • This week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction • Read the earliest reviews of The Catcher in the Rye • Mark Haber’s TBR • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • How many Homers were there? • Growing up alongside the Odyssey • Questioning what you think you know about realism • Who were those girls Renoir kept painting? • The best reviewed books of the week • Gender, power, and writing a book about Bobby Kennedy • How PEN America’s avoiding its responsibilities to all writers • Why the collaborative effort of editing is the ultimate reward • Try reading these feminist reimaginings of myth