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Lit Hub Daily

July 3, 2025

TODAY: In 1883, Franz Kafka is born.

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“Thick classics are tackling existential issues, and aren’t skimping on ambition...” Why summer is actually the perfect time for big, fat books. | Lit Hub Criticism

Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante want to know: Have you considered an anarchist approach to plot? | Lit Hub Craft

Activists Darlene Okpo, Jacob A.C. Remes, Julie Schweitert Colazzo and Steff Reed recommend essential texts on revolution. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

Kathy Wang’s The Satisfaction Cafe, Charlie English’s The CIA Book Club, and Nell Stevens’s The Original all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks

Dan Leach recommends rule-shattering anti-novels by Michael Bible, Maggie Nelson, Haruki Murakami, and more. | Lit Hub Criticism

Clarence A. Haynes explains how (and why) to craft your novel soundscape: “I needed sounds that were lush, that could carry these characters’ emotional weight.” | Lit Hub Craft

“It's a total, self-encapsulating project—about a total, self-encapsulating doom.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks

“He fumbled for the watch in his pocket and found, for the fifth time since he’d arrived in the garden, that the minutes would not vapor themselves away.” Read from Nishant Batsha’s new novel, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart. | Lit Hub Fiction

AN IMMERSIVE, TENDERLY WRITTEN NOVEL

Nishant Batsha’s new book is an expansive and poignant story of love, radical ambition, and intellectual rebirth set at the dawn of World War I.

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“A series of haphazard walking errands led to me wandering downtown, lugging a tub of CBD gummies, a multipack of ultra-absorbent tampons and a 10-lb biography of Sylvia Plath.” Patricia Lockwood on Plath’s Collected Prose. | London Review of Books

Spencer J. Weinreich delights in “the generous sense of the preposterous” alive in Helen Traubel’s The Metropolitan Opera Murders. | Public Books

Christina Lee chronicles a feminist history of underground comix. | The Comics Journal

“Taking the picture wasn’t a conscious decision as much as an impulse; some innate feeling telling me that this moment was worth remembering.” Alana Pockros on how her mother’s MS diagnosis taught them both to see art differently. | The New York Times Magazine

Maria Popova considers H.D.’s concepts of vision and consciousness: “But nothing feeds the over-mind more, nothing reveals it and anneals it more, than love.” | The Marginalian

“He speaks simultaneously as a rapper being surveilled and as one of the 3.6 million Americans whose liberty is in some meaningful way restricted despite their notionally being free.” On state censorship and B.G.’s Freedom of Speech. | Los Angeles Review of Books

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO BURN IT DOWN

The debut essay collection by cultural critic Maris Kreizman—an introspective, searing account of the life experiences that have pushed this former “good Democrat” even further to the political left.

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A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK