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Lit Hub Daily

December 17, 2025

TODAY: In 1273, Rumi dies.

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Because you asked for it (you ask for it every year). Here are the most scathing book reviews of 2025. | Book Marks

Why Virginia Woolf thought Katharine Mansfield stank like a “civet cat taken to streetwalking.” | Lit Hub Biography

“On a cold afternoon in the heart of Greenwich Village, Margaret C. Anderson bumped into the man who wanted to put her in prison.” How New York State almost banned Ulysses. | Lit Hub Criticism

“The love-thick seeking that resonated with readers was evident throughout DéLana’s life.” Remembering poet and novelist DéLana Dameron. | Lit Hub

Kate Evans looks at how Jane Austen’s family (and their socioeconomic status) nurtured the iconic author’s writing. | Lit Hub Art

Steven W. Thrasher on carrying sadness and managing anger in the face of the West’s crimes in Gaza. | Lit Hub Politics

Exploring David Thoreau’s “Kalendar,” a tool for tracking natural phenomena: “Anticipating the way that clock time would be harnessed to control human labor and thought, Thoreau sought an alternative to living that is also an alternative to his culture’s temporal conventions.” | Lit Hub Nature

CREATIVE WRITING AT THE NEW SCHOOL

Write your book. Be a part of our community of writers in New York City at The New School. Students choose from five tracks: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, arts writing, and writing for children and young adults, while pursuing their creative practice under the guidance of our extraordinary and generous faculty.

Submit your MFA application by the preferred deadline, January 15. If you are interested in the BA in Creative Writing or the Writing and Democracy Honors Program, the priority deadline is June 1.

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RESTAURANTS THAT DEFINE NEW YORK CITY

In Laura Buchwald’s The Book of Reservations, a gifted restaurateur caught between the living and the dead must hold her world together—her business, her relationships, and the restless spirits seeking closure—before all she’s built begins to unravel.

Read Now

Sonja Drimmer and Christopher J. Nygren offers four “small acts of friction” for resisting AI in education. | Public Books

“Magazines were a testing ground for new work, for writers to flex their muscles and pay their rent between novels.” Greta Rainbow on the state of book publishing at the end of magazines. | Dirt

Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor-Elect Ghazala Hashmi on why “reading is a subversive act.” | Shenandoah

“The novel also finds a canny way to capture how the drumbeat of war colonizes our imagination, no matter how far removed we may be from the front lines.” Jess Bergman on Helen DeWitt and Ilya Grindneff’s novel, Your Name Here. | The Nation

Tim Leonido considers Divine Right’s Trip, Gurney Norman’s 1972 novel of the post-counterculture. | The Point

“Respectability is the enemy of progressive queer politics because it rarely seeks justice for behavior perceived as criminal.” On watching Plainclothes in the age of ICE. | The Baffler

LITERARY NIGHTS