A Week That Refused to Stay Still
June 26, 2026 marks the birthday of E. R. Braithwaite, born in 1912, and the literary week surrounding it has been anything less than quiet. From Iranian writers reckoning with American bombs to crossword tournaments drawing unexpected crowds, the reading world generated more friction and feeling than any single shelf could hold.
What stitched it together was an undercurrent of pressure – political exile, library censorship, the slow erosion of public space for queer history – sitting alongside more intimate concerns: how writers read, how nostalgia warps memory, how a cartoonist becomes a critic. Books and the people who make them are doing heavy lifting this week.
Writers Under Pressure, Real and Imagined
Iranian writer Shohreh Laici put it plainly in a Lit Hub Memoir piece about war and her mother: “I would never blame them. But being around Americans while this country is bombing mine is the last thing I can do.” There is no abstraction there. No rhetorical distance. The sentence arrives like a door closing, and the essay holds that tension without releasing it into easy resolution.
Maria Stepanova’s essay on Russia’s new generation of political exiles, translated by Sasha Dugdale and published in Equator, works in a different register – more analytical, longer in its historical view – but circles the same condition: what writing looks like when staying home is no longer an option. These two pieces, read together, describe a specific kind of literary displacement that no amount of exile literature has quite exhausted.
The Canon Under Examination
Julian Lucas’s profile of Colson Whitehead in The New Yorker gets at something worth sitting with. The piece notes that Whitehead has “deftly escaped these pigeonholes, in part by insuring that each of his books is radically different from the last.” That strategy – formal restlessness as a kind of self-protection – is not common. Most writers find a mode and stay in it. Whitehead keeps moving, and Lucas’s profile traces what that looks like across a career.
Over at Lit Hub Criticism, Maggie McKinley’s essay takes on Joan Didion’s “future-oriented” nostalgia, a phrase that reframes what has often been read as pure backward-looking sentiment. Didion, in McKinley’s reading, isn’t grieving the past so much as using it to project forward – a distinction that changes how her work functions emotionally and politically.
David Denby’s piece in The New Yorker on the long history of failed Odyssey adaptations raises a question that feels genuinely open: can Christopher Nolan finally break that streak? Denby explores the pattern without sentimentality, treating each failed adaptation as its own problem rather than evidence of the source material’s untouchability. Whether Nolan’s version succeeds or doesn’t, Denby’s framing makes the history of failure interesting in its own right.
Demetris Papadimitropoulos writes in Lit Hub History about how queer history gets “admitted to the historical record,” using Tennessee Williams and Daniel Ciba’s Blue Roses as focal points. The piece grapples with the ambiguity of proof – what counts as evidence, who decides, and why the archive has so consistently failed queer lives. It is one of the sharper methodological arguments to appear in a literary context this week.
Meanwhile, Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles spoke for Broadcast about poetic kinship and life after death. Their conversation moves between the cosmic and the specific in the way that conversations between poets tend to – usefully unsystematic, resistant to summary. What holds it together is mutual seriousness about what poetry is actually for.
Craft, Lists, and the Limits of POV
Lincoln Michel published a craft rant at Counter Craft on the multiplicity of fictional points of view. His argument pushes against oversimplified workshop advice about POV consistency, making a case for fiction that holds more than one perspective without losing coherence. It is the kind of piece that will circulate in writing classes and be argued over in margins.
Susan Orlean, speaking to Brendan O’Meara for Longreads, described her approach this way: “I think it kind of exemplifies what I try to do with my work, which is to take something quite ordinary and elevate it in a way that you wouldn’t have considered, so in that sense that story is a perfect example of what I think I do as a writer.” That description fits her published work precisely – and hearing her name it directly is its own kind of craft essay.
What’s Getting Read, What’s Getting Cut
Maris Kreizman’s Lit Hub Reading List collects 40 great books you might have missed – framed explicitly as an alternative to JD Vance’s memoir. The list is an act of editorial redirection, gentle in tone but pointed in intent. It operates on the assumption that reading time is finite and that the opportunity cost of certain books is worth naming.
Fewer public libraries are doing Pride displays this year, as reported by 404 Media – and the reasons are, as the piece notes, “unfortunately (politically) obvious.” That quiet retraction of public visibility has its own literary dimension: it affects which books get shelved at eye level, which authors get recommended to teenagers, and which communities register their own existence in public space. The display is never just a display.
Eythana Miller’s piece in The Dial on preserving Pennsylvania Dutch offers a different angle on language under pressure. Miller writes: “I’ve always assumed that the language’s oral nature has contributed to its concrete, factual diction. There are things you write that you almost never speak aloud.” The observation describes something specific about the relationship between speech and writing that most linguistic commentary misses – and it arrives embedded in a preservation effort that carries its own urgency.
Elsewhere on Lit Hub this week: the labor history and complicated racial solidarity of mid-century Minneapolis, the elder Millennial women’s experience of American life, a case for slowing down and noticing nature, time travel stories reconsidered outside their usual cautionary frame, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most overlooked story collection, Barry Windsor-Smith’s reinvention of Marvel’s Wolverine, George Sand getting dapper, and the first – and only – book ban case ever heard by the Supreme Court. Howard Zinn’s legacy got a full treatment from Dave Zirin and Andrew Holter in the Boston Review, with Holter arguing that “an optimism rooted in fact and history and the politics of change is something all of us, particularly young people, desperately need.” Hagai Palevsky considered whether writers should read and whether cartoonists should be critics, through the lens of Sethphemera, a collection of essays and interviews by the cartoonist Seth. The Washington Irving anniversary sits somewhere in all of this – “Rip Van Winkle” published, the calendar noting it, the story about a man who slept through everything and woke to find the world had moved on without asking his permission.
