Lit Hub Daily: December 17, 2025

TODAY: In 1273, Rumi dies.  

• Even we love to get a little petty sometimes. These are the most scathing book reviews of 2025. | Book Marks
• Why Virginia Woolf thought Katharine Mansfield stank like a “civet cat taken to streetwalking.” | Lit Hub Biography
• “On a cold afternoon in the heart of Greenwich Village, Margaret C. Anderson bumped into the man who wanted to put her in prison.” How New York State almost banned Ulysses. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Kate Evans looks at how Jane Austen’s family (and their socioeconomic status) nurtured the iconic author’s writing. | Lit Hub Art
• Exploring David Thoreau’s Kalendar, a tool for tracking natural phenomena: “Anticipating the way that clock time would be harnessed to control human labor and thought, Thoreau sought an alternative to living that is also an alternative to his culture’s temporal conventions.” | Lit Hub Nature
• Sonja Drimmer and Christopher J. Nygren offers four “small acts of friction” for resisting AI in education. | Public Books
• “Magazines were a testing ground for new work, for writers to flex their muscles and pay their rent between novels.” Greta Rainbow on the state of book publishing at the end of magazines. | Dirt
• Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor–Elect Ghazala Hashmi on why “reading is a subversive act.” | Shenandoah
• “The novel also finds a canny way to capture how the drumbeat of war colonizes our imagination, no matter how far removed we may be from the front lines.” Jess Bergman on Helen DeWitt and Ilya Grindneff’s novel, Your Name Here. | The Nation
• Tim Leonido considers Divine Right’s Trip, Gurney Norman’s 1972 novel of the post-counterculture. | The Point
• “Respectability is the enemy of progressive queer politics because it rarely seeks justice for behavior perceived as criminal.” On watching Plainclothes in the age of ICE. | The Baffler

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