A Day’s Worth of Reading, Rooted in June 26
On June 26, 1817, Branwell Brontë was born – the brother who rarely gets the shelf space, the one whose life collapsed while his sisters built enduring literary empires. That biographical footnote opens a longer question running through much of today’s literary conversation: whose lives get absorbed into the historical record, and by what mechanisms does that absorption happen?
That question sits at the heart of Demetris Papadimitropoulos’s new piece at Lit Hub Criticism, which uses Daniel Ciba’s Blue Roses and the life of Tennessee Williams to examine how queer history earns – or fails to earn – admission into the archive.
The ambiguity of proof is, as Papadimitropoulos frames it, the central problem.
On Novels, Profiles, and Writers Talking About the Work
Walter Mosley’s contribution to Lit Hub Craft does something quietly useful: it refuses the metaphor that has quietly colonized how people discuss fiction. A novel, Mosley argues, is not a machine. He explores what a novel actually is – and the distinction matters, because machines optimize, produce, replicate. The implication running under Mosley’s piece is that fiction’s resistance to those verbs is exactly what makes it worth writing and reading at all.
Over at The New Yorker, Julian Lucas profiles Colson Whitehead with a line worth pausing on: “He has deftly escaped these pigeonholes, in part by insuring that each of his books is radically different from the last.” That commitment to formal restlessness – writing a zombie novel, then a historical novel about a different kind of American horror, then a heist story – is not just a career strategy. It reflects something about how Whitehead understands what fiction owes its readers: nothing predictable. Lucas’s profile is one of the longer pieces in today’s reading, and given Whitehead’s catalog, it earns the length.
Susan Orlean, speaking to Brendan O’Meara at Longreads, offers her own version of a writer’s credo: “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 The Orchid Thief and most of what she’s written since – the ordinary object held up to unusual light until it reveals something strange about the people obsessed with it.
Translation, Poetry, and the Fiction Being Published Now
Ye Hui, writing at Lit Hub In Conversation about translation and the feeling of completing a poem, offers a moment of origin: “I don’t remember the exact content of the poem, but it was the first time I had seen someone write poetry around me. It was very surprising, and I felt that I too could write like that.” There’s something in that statement about proximity – not instruction, not craft essays, but witnessing. Someone nearby writing, and the sudden collapse of the distance between observer and practitioner.
On the fiction side, Valérie Perrin’s Tata, translated by Hildegarde Serle, runs an excerpt at Lit Hub Fiction. Perrin traces the impulse behind the book to her childhood: “I think I’ve always written stories because I spent all my school vacations at my aunt’s.” Tata follows that line of inheritance. Book Marks has rounded up the best-reviewed fiction of June, and three titles dominate: Maggie O’Farrell’s Land, Ann Patchett’s Whistler, and Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco. That three writers with very different registers – O’Farrell’s historical intensity, Patchett’s structural control, Greer’s lighter comedic touch – share the same review cycle says something about how wide the appetite for literary fiction runs this month.
Serena Chopra’s TBR list at Lit Hub Reading Lists pulls in work by Susan Briante, Sappho, and Christopher Marmolejo, among others. Vanessa Miller’s separate list focuses on BIPOC-centered historical fiction, recommending titles by Sadeqa Johnson, ReShonda Tate, and Vanessa Riley. Two lists, two entirely different architectures of reading – one organized around a single reader’s wants, the other around a specific cultural and historical frame. Both end up making the case that reading lists are themselves a form of argument about what matters.
Culture, Politics, and the Edges of the Literary
Not everything today stays strictly within fiction’s borders. Ishmael Reed, writing at The Nation, examines rappers who support Trump – a phenomenon he describes as strange, which given Reed’s long history of writing against American cultural mythologies is a word he does not use lightly. Emily C. Hughes, at Defector, connects The Omen, Roe v. Wade, and what she calls diabolical motherhood – a pairing that sounds provocative until you consider how much horror cinema has always processed anxieties about women’s bodies and legal control over them. Jessica Luo, writing for The Hedgehog Review, looks at the Obama Presidential Center and what she characterizes as the gap between its stated uses and its actual ones. Gina Anne Tam, at the Los Angeles Review of Books, considers two new books exploring what freedom on the internet actually means – or whether it means anything at all anymore.
What holds this particular June 26 together is less a theme than a recurring friction: between record and erasure, between what writers say they do and what the work actually does, between a novel’s refusal to behave like a mechanism and the publishing industry’s persistent wish that it would. Mosley’s argument about the novel-as-non-machine is probably the shortest piece in today’s roundup. It might also be the most load-bearing.
