A Week That Covers Four Centuries of Literary Trouble
On this date in 1903, Mark Twain relocated to Florence, Italy – a detail that feels less like trivia and more like a useful reminder that writers have always been fleeing something. This week in literary publishing, the movement runs in every direction: backward into Sylvia Plath’s century, forward into AI’s threat to authorship, sideways into the surprisingly ancient roots of romantasy, and straight down into the literary history of the dildo, which turns out to be longer and better-documented than most readers probably assumed.
The 2026 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize shortlist is out, and Lit Hub has the authors. Elsewhere, the week’s reading touches on Gloria Steinem, Wendell Berry, John Berger, Louise Glück’s restaurant obsession, and what exactly went wrong at Scientific American. It is, by any measure, a dense week to be paying attention.
Plath, Violence, and the Archive
Writing in the Boston Review, Kristin Grogan considers new collections of Sylvia Plath’s writing and arrives at a line worth sitting with: “Plath described and wrote herself into the violence of her own century. She is now part of the record of the violence of our own.” That framing – Plath not as confessional curiosity but as historical document – reorients how her work gets read, moving her out of the mid-century psychology ward and into something more uncomfortable and permanent. The violence she catalogued did not age out. It compounded.
At The Baffler, Vivian Gornick remembers Gloria Steinem with a line that captures something true about how large-scale social change actually moves: “She was reaching women I would never know. This, I thought, was how social change really occurred.” Gornick isn’t describing policy or protest – she’s describing reach, the quiet arithmetic of influence spreading into rooms no single writer ever enters. It’s a generous observation, and an honest one.
Izabella Scott’s piece in The Paris Review traces the literary history of dildos, which is exactly the kind of sentence that sounds like a joke until you read it and realize the history is genuinely rich. Meanwhile, The New Yorker publishes two strong pieces this week: Hannah Goldfield on Louise Glück’s longstanding passion for restaurants, and a separate investigation into Ernest Hemingway’s complicated relationship with bullfighting author Barnaby Conrad – including the observation that “in several descriptions of these amateur events, including some of his own, Hemingway sounds less like a matador than a rodeo clown.” The image is hard to shake.
AI, Oligarchs, and the Market for Extinction
Arundhati Roy writes in Equator on AI as capitalism’s final form, and her framing is specific enough to be alarming: “The oligarchs do seem to believe in their extinction narrative – at least enough to have built themselves bunkers at the far ends of the Earth stocked with water, food and ammunition. But extinction is not what they are selling the rest of us.” The gap between what the very wealthy are privately preparing for and what they are publicly selling is Roy’s actual subject, and it’s a more precise critique than most AI commentary manages. She is not writing about chatbots. She is writing about who gets to survive and who gets the product pitch.
Separately, Lit Hub’s technology section makes a case that you genuinely don’t need a smartphone – a quieter argument, but one that lands differently sitting next to Roy’s piece. At The New York Times Magazine, A.O. Scott writes on John Berger’s antidote to infinite scroll: “You pay attention to his attention.” That compression – the discipline of attending, the resistance to velocity – is its own kind of counterargument to the week’s more anxious digital dispatches.
Genre, Adaptation, and the Booksellers of Taiwan
Sarah Clegg digs into the deep roots of romantasy at The Guardian, tracing the genre further back than its current TikTok-era visibility suggests. The piece arrives the same week that Lit Hub publishes a history of Irish legend’s aes sidhe – the “dangerously seductive fairies” of Celtic mythology – which, read together, suggests romantasy’s DNA is considerably older and stranger than the publishing industry’s current framing implies.
The Walrus asks what really makes a bad literary adaptation bad, a question that seems simple until you try to answer it honestly. The piece doesn’t settle for the obvious answers – unfaithfulness to the source, poor casting – and the result is more useful criticism than the genre usually gets. Adaptations fail for reasons that have almost nothing to do with whether a screenwriter loved the book.
At The Nation, Kelly Kong reports on Taiwan’s “bookstore revolution,” and the most telling exchange in the piece comes when Kong asks bookstore owners Tsai, Chang, and Chiang how they change minds. All three answered, Kong writes, the way one would expect bookstore owners to: by pointing to the power of reading. That’s either naive or the most pragmatic answer available, depending on how much credit you extend to slow change. The nation’s bookstore culture, by Kong’s account, is operating on faith that the long game is still a game worth playing.
Willis Jenkins writes at The Hedgehog Review on Wendell Berry, calling him “the farmer-prophet of rural Kentucky” – an epithet that Berry, who was skeptical of most epithets, would probably have resisted. Jenkins’s remembrance appears alongside Lit Hub’s own look at the growing role of memoir in the academy, pieces on Chinese American history, and an investigation into what happened to Scientific American, where Emmet Fraizer at The Nation examines the publication’s uncertain future and messy recent past. Scientific American has been a trusted institution for long enough that its current instability reads less like a media industry story and more like a cultural one.
Competition, Monsters, and the Staying Power of a Ghost Story
JSTOR Daily revisits the writing competition that produced both Frankenstein and The Vampyre – still one of the most productive nights of bad weather in literary history. The competition, which took place at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, gathered Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori under the same roof during an eruption-induced global cooling event. Byron proposed they each write a ghost story. Mary Shelley, then eighteen, produced the novel that invented science fiction. Polidori produced the template for every vampire story that followed. Byron and Percy Shelley, by most accounts, produced nothing worth saving.
Also on Lit Hub this week: a look at the Brontës through the lens of botany, an essay on why nameless narrators go unnamed, Nina Chayka’s search for the rarest Nabokov paperbacks in America, and three new books examining Joe Biden’s support for Israel. Lit Hub also publishes “Elevation,” a new poem by Lindsay Turner. The week closes with a question the editors put plainly enough that it functions more as provocation than inquiry – are you the asshole if you think books are over? – which is the kind of thing that gets asked when the people asking it know perfectly well the answer is complicated, and that complicated answers are exactly what a week like this one is for.
Cormac McCarthy, meanwhile, is getting the MFA treatment. Lit Hub’s Craft section poses a question that anyone who has been in a graduate writing program will recognize immediately: was McCarthy that guy in your MFA? The guy who never workshopped well, whose sentences nobody could quite explain, and who turned out to be right about everything.
