What Literary Hub Was Talking About on September 11, 2026

By Andy — 2026-09-12 — Literary News

Wednesday's literary news was doing what Wednesday always does: gathering the week's stray observations and pretending they belong together.

Lit Hub Daily got busy.

There's something absorbing about watching the literary internet notice things on the same day. Harlan Coben walked into some interview and said "Sometimes, it's a simple 'what-if.'"—as if that explains anything—while Phillip Lopate was elsewhere tracing the genealogy of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which Americans can't stop arguing about because a ghost story is apparently a permanent real estate dispute. The legend won't die. Neither will the discourse.

What stuck with me, though, was Linford D. Fisher's book making the Cundill Prize shortlist. "Stealing America," a history of Native American enslavement before the African slave trade became the dominant narrative of American bondage. It's the kind of book that rewrites things most people never learned in the first place. Fisher's argument is more or less that colonial America enslaved Indigenous people in numbers nobody talks about—something like 600,000 across the continent—and that this fact has been scrubbed from textbooks so thoroughly that most educated people don't realise it happened at scale. Actually, that's not quite right. Most educated people don't realise it happened at all.

The literary internet also noticed children's literature in translation (Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and Anam Zafar discussing it), a poem about hibiscus and late summer (Marcus Wicker), new fiction from Amanda Peters, and an opera adaptation of a comic. Books about books. Essays about essays. The usual spiral.

Emma Cline's "Switzy," Francis Fukuyama's "In the Realm of the Last Man," and R.F. Kuang's "Taipei" were getting reviewed that week. The machinery keeps moving, grinding out opinions and summaries.

There was also, without much fanfare, something about medieval psychiatrists prescribing ostrich liver for distress, which feels like both a historical fact and a metaphor for how we think about solutions.

By the end of the day, the news had scattered. Some of it will matter in five years. Most of it won't.

Source: "Stealing America has been shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize." — Literary Hub