A Week Built Around Grief, Dissent, and the Written Word
The week of June 15, 2026 opened with a piece of literary history worth noting: on this date in 1914, Wyndham Lewis published the first issue of Blast, the short-lived magazine that became the printed voice of Britain’s Vorticist movement. Over a century later, the literary internet was running on a similar energy – provocative, argumentative, and refusing to settle for comfortable conclusions.
Lit Hub assembled one of its denser weekly runs, pulling together elegies, political criticism, interviews from the archive, and at least one genuine attempt to rehabilitate Sigmund Freud through the medium of fiction. The thread running through it all: writing as something you do when the easier options have failed you.
Remembering Marjane Satrapi
The emotional weight of the week belonged to poet and scholar Fatemeh Shams, who wrote a remembrance of Marjane Satrapi that refused the standard obituary register. Shams described Satrapi as a reminder “that in the bleakest times, art, writing, and human connection are radical acts of repair” – a framing that positioned Satrapi’s work not as comfort but as counterforce. The piece moved through layers of loss and sorrow without resolving them neatly.
Alongside Shams’s essay, The Comics Journal surfaced a 2006 interview with Satrapi, conducted by Chris Mautner. The archival piece offered a different angle – Satrapi speaking for herself, before the full weight of her cultural legacy had been assigned to her. The two pieces read well together: one written from the outside of grief, one from before it had reason to exist.
The week’s range of subjects kept widening from there. Harper’s ran a literary and philosophical look at the experience of being a garbage collector. Public Books published Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera on exile, Edward Said, and what Herlihy-Mera called “the scars of ‘Americanization.'” At The Nation, Amy Goodman spoke with John Nichols about journalism’s purpose and the current threats to press freedom – a conversation that didn’t require much abstraction to feel urgent.
Children’s Books, Bad Dads, and the Reading Habit
Jessica Winter’s piece in The New Yorker made the case that critiquing children’s literature on its merits misses what actually matters. Librarians and educators, Winter noted, are less concerned with taste than with keeping children reading during what they consider a critical developmental window. The argument landed somewhere uncomfortable: that the content of a book may be less important than the fact of it being read at all.
Meanwhile, Lit Hub’s own criticism section ran a defense of Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” framed specifically as a poem for bad dads – which is either a narrow audience or an extremely large one, depending on your family. Emily Temple also took on the annual ritual of summer reading lists, reading all of them so readers wouldn’t have to. The findings weren’t described in detail, which is probably its own kind of findings.
AI, Impasse, and the Limits of the Generative
Two pieces addressed artificial intelligence from opposite ends of the anxiety spectrum. At NYRB, Dan Chiasson argued for the necessity of the impasse in the writing process – the stuck moment, the dead end, the refusal of language to cooperate – as something AI cannot replicate and writers should not be too quick to route around. The essay treated difficulty not as a problem to be solved but as the location where actual writing tends to happen.
Xia Jia, writing in The MIT Press Reader, took a wider frame, examining the limits of both human and artificial intelligence as writing tools. Where Chiasson was defending something, Jia was mapping something – the terrain where machine generation and human composition diverge, and where they uncomfortably overlap. This tension between AI output and human literary voice has been building throughout 2026, and these two essays, read side by side, suggest there’s no settled position yet, only competing discomforts.
Hal Schrieve surveyed children’s literature from a socialist perspective at Lux, anchoring the piece to a specific claim: “Children are our smallest comrades – they live within our victories and failures.” The framing was direct enough to be either bracing or exhausting, depending on the reader’s tolerance for political readings of picture books. Schrieve did not appear to be hedging.
Lakshmi Rivera Amin’s interview with Sarah Schulman at Hyperallergic covered different ground, opening with Schulman’s observation that “the whole lesbian world was around poets.” The interview, filed under the week’s broader cultural sprawl, addressed Schulman’s writing life and the communities that shaped it – a reminder that literary scenes are social structures before they’re anything else.
History, Healthcare, and the Long Record
Two pieces from The MIT Press Reader bookended the week’s historical range. Virginia McGee Richards wrote about the enslaved South Carolinians who rowed to freedom along the Lowcountry’s Inner Passage – a specific, documented act of resistance recovered for a general readership. Separately, Lit Hub Health published a piece tracing how a Jamaican family’s history of struggle and survival reveals centuries of Black exclusion from healthcare systems. Neither piece framed its subject as settled history.
Caleb Brennan’s essay at The Baffler explored the fascist internet nihilism of groyper politics, and Patricia Lockwood, writing in the London Review of Books, turned her attention to what she called the problem of American Catholicism – a subject that generates more heat than almost any other she could have chosen. The week’s also-ran list included pieces on midwifery history, GPS development, speculative fiction’s necessity, suburban time, progressive blindness, artificial light and insomnia, anti-apartheid resistance in 1970s South Africa, and a post office that handles letters addressed to the dead.
Also notable: Namwali Serpell and Angela Flournoy in conversation about Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Greg Sarris on telling the stories of California’s indigenous communities, a piece asking whether care is the answer to American gerontocracy, and – filed without apparent irony next to the heavier material – a guide to writing a novel in 33 days. This week in literary history also marked the anniversary of Dante Alighieri being named prior of Florence, a role he accepted before exile made the appointment look like a warning.
