What We're Reading This Week: Five Books That Landed Hard

By Andy — 2026-09-18 — Literary News

I opened the Lit Hub roundup this morning and found five reviews so thoroughly argued that ignoring them felt like a small betrayal.

Each one.

The lead—Joseph O'Neill's piece on Jacob Weisberg's *Profiles in Cowardice*—moves with the precision of a legal brief written by someone genuinely angry. Weisberg spends his book investigating eight powerful Americans who knew exactly what they were opposing, then folded anyway when the weight came down. Not because they were stupid. Not because they lacked resources. But because when the real test arrived, pragmatism wore a prettier face than principle. O'Neill doesn't soften this. He notes that Minnesota's ordinary citizens, by contrast, raised their heads above the parapet and protected their neighbors from federal violence. That's the shadow cast across the entire enterprise—the people with everything to lose stood firm; the people with nothing to lose bent.

Hua Hsu's review of Brian Dillon's *Ambivalence* takes a stranger, more melancholic route. Dillon writes in the third person about his own late teens and early twenties, that peculiar liminal zone when you're mostly just reading voraciously and waiting for your life to begin. Actually, that's not quite right. He's not waiting. He's *thinking*, turning ideas over in his hands until they feel like his own. His parents die. His siblings grow distant. But somehow Woolf and Barthes matter more than the damage. Hsu finds something luxurious in that boredom—the kind of unhurried hours spent hoarding cultural scraps that don't exist anymore, if they ever really did.

What's curious about this quartet of reviews is the pattern underneath.

Weisberg's book asks why the powerful failed. Dillon's asks what solitude did to a thinking mind. Felipe De La Hoz's piece on Mahmoud Khalil's *No Land to Stand On* addresses sovereignty itself—the Palestinian refusal to be reduced to a symbol, when history keeps trying to make you stand for something other than your own life. Khalil, as Dillon might understand, wants his own story back. The other three books—Edna Bonhomme on Imani Thompson's *Honey*, Jeremy Gordon on Jon Ronson's *The Castle*—aren't excerpted here in full, but they're worth tracking down.

This is what book reviewing should do. Not celebrate. Not condemn from on high. Just crack the thing open and let you see what's actually moving inside it.

Source: "Weisberg turns JFK's Profiles in Courage on its head, cataloging instead "the weak and too willing."" — Publishers Weekly