A Week in Reading That Refused to Stay in One Lane
John Keats was born on October 26, 1795 – which means this week marked 230 years since the world got the poet who would die at 25 and still outwrite most people with a full lifespan. That anniversary lands in the middle of a literary week dense with horror, grief, AI anxiety, and a recurring question about who actually gets to survive in publishing. The timing feels less like coincidence and more like the calendar doing editorial work.
Horror bookstores are opening everywhere, indie publishers are closing, and the Haredim are arguing that machines cannot perform mitzvot.
What follows is a map of where serious literary thinking went this week – from Edward Hopper’s diner to the cahiers de doléances moldering in 16,000 French town halls to the death industry, which is apparently now being taken over by women.
The Gothic Underpinning of the Week’s Best Criticism
The Lit Hub Film section ran a piece this week drawing a line from Psycho to Stephen King’s Christine, arguing that highways in horror fiction operate as something “altogether different” from their mundane counterparts – that they “expose themselves as highways to hell.” It’s the kind of cultural observation that sounds obvious until you sit with it, and then you realize no one had quite said it that plainly before. The road as damnation rather than freedom is doing a lot of work in American storytelling, and the piece traces that geography with real care.
Over at JSTOR Daily, Jesse Wright takes the same road – literally – and examines the ghosts of Route 66 in the age of AI. That piece sits in productive tension with the Wired report on horror bookstores multiplying across the country, a boom that suggests physical, curated spaces for dark fiction are finding an audience precisely when digital noise is loudest. The Los Angeles Review of Books rounded out the Halloween weekend reading with a piece on a 19th-century death train, which is exactly what it sounds like and promises to linger. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran Andie Eisen’s reported piece on women entering the death industry in leadership roles – a different kind of horror story, or possibly its antidote.
Amelia Soth’s piece for n+1 on Carlo Ginzburg’s method – what she calls “archive roulette” – contains the week’s most quietly memorable line: “The element of chance is what prevents us from filling in the gaps with the things we already expect to see.” That’s a statement about historiography, but it’s also an argument for the kind of reading that doesn’t confirm what you already believe. Ginzburg’s approach to archival research, which Soth examines with genuine enthusiasm, involves following fragmentary evidence into unexpected places rather than constructing a thesis and then mining the past for proof.
Publishing, AI, and the Machinery of Attention
Wired ran a piece this week framed as the “life and death of a workplace AI assistant” – and subtitled it, pointedly, “a publishing horror story.” The horror isn’t that AI killed anyone’s job outright but that the assistant’s existence created a kind of low-grade institutional dread, a sense of accountability to something that doesn’t understand what it’s supposed to be accountable for. It belongs alongside the piece from The Nation, in which Grace Byron explores the Jewish case against AI through the lens of Haredi theology: the Haredim argued that mitzvot – good deeds performed to fulfill a Torah commandment – cannot be replaced by machines, because the moral weight of an act is inseparable from the human intention behind it. That’s not a fringe position; it’s a philosophically coherent critique that secular tech discourse keeps failing to engage.
The New Yorker published Léo Keler’s piece (translated by Katie Assef) on the cahiers de doléances, the notebooks made available in more than 16,000 town halls across France so that citizens could write down their concerns and frustrations – and which then faded into obscurity. The piece treats these documents as a case study in collective expression that the state solicited and then essentially abandoned. There’s something in there about platforms and comment sections, though Keler doesn’t force the connection. The Baffler, meanwhile, made the more explicit argument: Substack didn’t save writing on the internet. It just added more material to an attention economy that was already overwhelming.
The Chicago Review of Books ran a wide-ranging interview with Annie Ernaux covering student protests, her Nobel Prize, and the mechanics of autofiction. Maris Kreizman’s piece for Longreads takes on debut novels and the peculiar bind they create – the expectation that a writer’s first book will be both fresh and fully formed, when most of the best careers are built on the slow accumulation of failure. Josie Adams wrote about co-writing a book with her father, Tony Shalhoub, which is one of those collaborations that could have been a disaster and apparently wasn’t. Maggie Shipstead’s piece for Longreads on her reading habits includes the week’s most honest description of what serious readers actually want: “The dream, even for a nonmonogamist like myself, is The One, the book that makes all others disappear, that enchants you completely and exclusively until the last page boots you back out into the world.”
The Pieces That Deserve More Space Than a Digest Can Give
Simon Torracinta’s essay in Dissent on John Berger argues that Berger’s criticism derived its power from a specific refusal: he would not separate life from politics. The piece quotes Torracinta directly – “It was precisely this rejection of the separation between life and politics that made Berger’s criticism of art so powerful” – and tracks how that refusal shaped everything from his television work to Ways of Seeing. It’s a useful corrective to the version of Berger that gets cited as an aesthetic authority while his politics get quietly bracketed.
Kevin Ng’s piece in The Baffler considers two recent works of fiction – Yiyun Li’s Music Against the Night and Barbara Kingsolver’s Partita – through the lens of music, examining how both writers use musical structure as an organizing principle rather than mere metaphor. Harper’s Bazaar published Kaitlyn Greenidge and Samantha Irby in conversation about sexy monsters, guilty pleasures, and Wicker, which is the kind of interview that literary culture produces in October and nowhere else. The Chicago Review of Books piece on indie publishers closing made the case that when small houses die, the industry loses “the heartbeat” of author development – the only spaces willing to take risks across a writer’s entire career rather than on a single commercially viable book.
The Lit Hub History section drew a direct line between 1930s Berlin – fake news, far-right propaganda, exaggerated crowd sizes, a fractured left – and the present, without needing to spell out the comparison. Lit Hub Politics published a piece arguing that the road to American fascism was paved specifically by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Traci Brimhall explored odes, elegies, and the mechanics of writing through grief. Rebecca Perry shared her TBR. Heliand, Beowulf, and the development of musical notation appeared in the same sentence as a day in the life of a baby Tyrannosaurus rex, which is either a sign of a healthy editorial range or chaos, depending on your tolerance.
The Lit Hub Art section ran the story behind Nighthawks, Edward Hopper’s most dissected painting – the diner, the fluorescent light, the three people who are not talking to each other. Keats’s birthday falls in a month already loaded with literary anniversaries, and this week added to that pile: the assassination of socialist Jean Jaurès, the history of the Loch Ness Monster as a human construction, Maria Edgeworth reconsidered as an economist, and Anika Fajardo writing about connecting to her Colombian heritage through magical realism. Whether any of it sticks depends entirely on which door you walked through – the horror bookstore, the archive, or the diner where nobody is speaking and the light is very, very bright.
