October 26 in Books: A Birthday, a Painting, and a Publishing Paradox
Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye was born on this date in 1900, a fact worth sitting with before the week’s reading pile swallows everything else. Boye, whose work cut between lyric poetry and dystopian fiction, remains one of Scandinavian literature’s more quietly influential figures – the kind of writer who gets rediscovered in waves, usually when the world feels like it’s moving in directions she already described. Meanwhile, the conversation around what fiction is and who publishes it is getting louder, stranger, and more statistically disorienting by the day.
Across several publications this week, writers and critics are pressing on questions that don’t resolve neatly: whether AI belongs in Jewish religious law, whether creative hobbies are entry points to political action, and whether a literary ecosystem in apparent decline can simultaneously produce millions more books per year than it did a generation ago. The pieces are varied, but something threads through them – an anxiety about what stories are for, and who gets to decide.
Brandon Taylor, Minor Black Figures, and the Weight of Writing About Black Art
At The Center For Fiction, Matthew Sitman sat down with Brandon Taylor to discuss Minor Black Figures, Taylor’s exploration of Black art and the critical frameworks that surround it. Taylor is one of the more precise prose writers working right now, and the conversation – hosted by Lit Hub – gets into what it actually costs to write about art made under duress, celebrated selectively, and filed away in categories that don’t always fit.
The discussion arrives at a moment when questions of representation in literary criticism are anything but settled. Taylor’s work tends to resist the instinct to resolve tension into takeaway, which makes him a difficult but rewarding interview subject. Whether the conversation published matches the sharpness of his essays is a question worth investigating directly.
Joe Biden, the Road to Fascism, and Maria Edgeworth’s Economic Secrets
Lit Hub Politics is running a piece that frames the road to American fascism not as a story of the far right alone, but as something the Democratic Party – and specifically Joe Biden – helped construct through its own failures and compromises. The argument is pointed and will not go down smoothly for everyone, but the piece treats its premise as a thesis to be argued rather than a slogan to be repeated.
Elsewhere in history that cuts sideways, Lit Hub Biography has a piece on Maria Edgeworth, the early 19th-century Irish novelist who, it turns out, was quietly introducing readers to foundational economic concepts through her fiction. Edgeworth worked at a time when women writing directly about economics would have been dismissed or worse, so the classroom was the novel. The piece examines how she threaded ideas about property, exchange, and labor into stories that readers of her era took as domestic realism.
Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks gets its own treatment at Lit Hub Art – the story behind the painting, the diner that may or may not have existed in the form Hopper depicted, and the particular loneliness the canvas has been asked to carry for over eighty years. Few images in American art have been reproduced more, theorized more, or parodied more, yet the original still stops people.
Anika Fajardo, writing for Lit Hub Craft, traces how magical realism became the tool through which she reached her Colombian heritage – “I had found a way to understand the truth – or a truth – about who I was and where I came from.” The piece is honest about the difference between using a literary tradition and being used by it, and about what it means to inherit a form from writers who built it out of very different pressures than the ones she grew up with.
The Jewish Case Against AI, Sexy Monsters, and John Berger’s Staying Power
At The Nation, Grace Byron takes on what she frames as the Jewish case against AI, anchored in a specific doctrinal dispute: Haredim scholars arguing that mitzvot – good deeds performed to fulfill a Torah commandment – cannot be replaced by machines. The argument is not purely theological. It touches on what makes an action meaningful, whether intention can be outsourced, and whether the efficiency logic driving AI adoption is compatible with religious frameworks built around the irreducible value of human effort.
Kaitlyn Greenidge and Samantha Irby, speaking with Harper’s Bazaar, took their conversation somewhere more enjoyable – sexy monsters, guilty pleasures, and Wicker. The pairing makes sense: both writers have a gift for finding the serious thing inside the apparently silly one, and for refusing to apologize for what they find entertaining. At Dissent, Simon Torracinta writes on John Berger, whose criticism of art derived its power, Torracinta argues, from “this rejection of the separation between life and politics.” Berger died in 2017, and the piece makes a case that the urgency of his work hasn’t dimmed so much as become more obviously necessary.
The Publishing Paradox, Catapult’s Loss, and Kafka’s New Science
The most structurally interesting conversation of the week appears at Public Books, where Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette discuss what they call the literary ecosystem. The question they’re circling is pointed: “If the literary ecosystem is dying, how do you make sense of the fact that we’ve gone from 10,000 to millions of works of published fiction annually, in the US alone?” The numbers are real, and they don’t point in a single direction. More books exist. Whether that means more literature, more readers, more money for writers, or simply more files uploaded to retail platforms is a different set of questions entirely.
Aaron Schuster, author of How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, writes for The MIT Press Reader on madness, literary philosophy, and the strange intellectual territory Kafka was mapping without quite naming it. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece mourning Catapult Books, with Los Angeles writers describing the press as “intrinsic to L.A. culture and L.A. literature.” Catapult had built a particular identity – committed to emerging voices, to fiction that didn’t soften its edges – and its absence is being felt in specific, practical ways by writers who depended on it not just as a publisher but as a community anchor.
Also in fiction this week: Lit Hub published an excerpt from Intan Paramaditha’s Night of a Thousand Hells, translated by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao, which opens with a line that earns its strangeness – “Revolutions always begin with ugly stepsisters. Our little sister was neither ugly nor revolutionary.” And Lit Hub Music ran a piece arguing that boy bands actually matter for boys, making the case with the kind of earnestness that dares you to dismiss it: “Books and boy bands are a bard’s best balm.” Whether that sentence is clever or painful probably says something about where you stood in the lunch room circa 2003.
The Catapult question is the one that lingers. A press described as intrinsic to a city’s literary life closes, and the writers who published there are left explaining to anyone who’ll listen what exactly was lost – knowing that the explanation itself is part of what makes the loss real, and that the millions of new books arriving every year won’t fill the particular shape of the gap.
