November 24 – 28, 2025

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

• “Plenty of vociferous readers can sustain themselves by library card alone, but the coveting of the physical object of the codex is its own thing.” In praise of bibliomania. | Lit Hub History
• “The voice of a free people is full of turbulence and grace.” Read Marilynne Robinson’s remarks upon receiving the Lewis H. Lapham Award for Literary Excellence (with an introduction from Ayana Mathis). | Lit Hub
• “Please stop imposing your moralistic, colonial, and religious ideas on me.” How sex workers organize across the Global South. | Lit Hub Politics
• After six rounds of voting, you’ve finally chosen Literary Twitter’s greatest icon! Congratulations to Joyce Carol Oates. | Lit Hub
• Kevin Lozano explores the legacy of Malcolm Cowley, the editor who helped make the American literary canon and who “believe[d] so earnestly and powerfully in the work of his peers that he spent his life making sure they would not be forgotten.” | The New Yorker
• “They are violent, though neither produces what one would term loud comics, in the boisterous sense.” Claire Napier places Julia Gfrörer’s work in conversation with Moto Hagio’s. | The Comics Journal
• Why small presses, not AI models, are the future of publishing. | The Bookseller
• “The mycelium/mushroom model works effectively as a way to convey the relationship between the singularity of a dream and the vast network of ideas from which it grows.” Sharon Sliwinski on fungus, Freud, and the endless networks of existence. | The MIT Press Reader
• Lily Meyer explores the conviction of Stolen Flower, the trilingual poetry collection by Isthmus Zapotec poet and activist Irma Pineda. | Poetry
• “This narrowing of attention—pleasure without context—marks a stark departure from the origins of foodie culture itself.” Alicia Kennedy considers the past and (imperiled) present of the foodie. | The Yale Review
• Byung-Chul Han on the pleasures of spending slow time in the “richly sensual and material” world of the garden. | Orion
• Lamorna Ash reads self-help books about the art of conversation. | The Dial
• Toye Oladinni examines celebrity, fantasy, and dream analyst Lauren Lawrence’s 2002 coffee table book, Private Dreams of Public People. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub:

John Irving talks to Wayne Catan about wrestling, coming-of-age, and his new book • On the persistent human desire for transformation • The ceremony and intimacy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Counting-Out Rhyme”  • The role of neologisms and idioms in Croatia’s linguistic landscape • Joseph Luzzi chronicles a Renaissance-Era orphanage in Florence • Paul Cornell, Stuart Moore, and Chris Ryall on loving Marvel comics • Britain’s early history of colonization in Ireland • Why do we need to dream? • How crossword puzzles built three major publishers • The best book covers of November • Widespread political censorship in school yearbooks •  November’s best reviewed books • New paperback editions for December • The 16 new books out this week