Hélène Bessette and the Novel as Arc Lamp

“Though a novel, the book can also be read as a cacophonous speech-collage-turned-philosophical-investigation of crime and punishment.”

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Last Days at the Aqueduct: New York’s Rundown Racetrack

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“Let me be clear: I don’t ever want to see this story again.”

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This Week in Literary History: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is Performed for the First Time (Probably)

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. The earliest existing eyewitness account of a performance of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth comes to us from the astrologer Simon Forman, who saw the play at the Globe Theater on April 20,

Literary Hub·Aug 3, 2026

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Australian poetry classics: Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells gives Sydney Harbour back its darkness

Five Bells is an elegy for Kenneth Slessor’s friend Joe Lynch, an artist who drowned in Sydney Harbour in 1927 after falling from a ferry.

Bronwyn Lea, Professor in Australian Literature and Writing, The University of Queensland·Aug 5, 2026

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Literary Hub

Awake Awake

All is recollection save for the slender membrane of now. Every present thought, every present feeling, collides with a league of their familial ghosts. And if our lives in this moment seem flimsy, that is because they are. We dwell

Lit Hub Excerpts·Aug 5, 2026

The New Yorker

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An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist’s Afterlife as a BookTok Star

Jacqueline Harpman wrote her best-known works in the nineteen-nineties, but her fiction’s elegiac loneliness seems to anticipate our own solitary, screen-bound era.

Katy Waldman·Aug 3, 2026·10 min read