Author: Daniel Cross
Daniel Cross
Daniel covers fiction and literary culture, with a particular interest in how stories hold up against the reality they describe.
Jamie D Brooks opens The Fleeing Season with a surgeon’s wrong-kidney confession in 2020, then asks whether America itself was a Never Event.
Russell Brand’s books pulled after conviction, Gershkovich reads in a Russian prison, and Salon’s collapse gets its autopsy. November 9’s literary news.
AO3 goes dark for weeks, the Prix Goncourt winner admits to using ChatGPT, and Camus turns 113. A dense week in books.
Natasha Trethewey honored John Edgar Wideman at Harper’s Magazine’s second Lewis H. Lapham Award ceremony, detailing six words that changed her writing life.
From horror bookstores booming nationwide to indie publishers closing and AI theology, the week’s literary criticism covered a lot of dark ground.
Plath as historical record, Roy on AI and bunkers, Glück’s restaurant life, and the 1816 competition that gave us Frankenstein. A packed week in books.
Sally Rooney’s publisher Faber has pulled her books from UK sale under the Terrorism Act after she pledged ongoing support for Palestine Action, proscribed in 2025.
MacKenzie Scott’s genre pivot, Anne Rice at 50, AI pitch bots, and the week’s sharpest literary arguments from Oct 5–9, 2026.
Lit Hub staff picks span Anne Washburn’s off-Broadway play, NYFF films, and Booker Prize titles generating real reader enthusiasm this October.
Novelist Caro Claire Burke is giving away free tickets to NAZA, a Gaza documentary from the team behind Oscar-winning No Other Land, at NYC’s IFC Center.