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    Vladimir Nabokov’s entire backlist is getting a brand new redesign.

    Emily Temple

    July 18, 2025, 10:14am

    There have been a few great covers for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. There have also been a lot of bad ones. It makes sense: it’s a difficult book to represent—which means that when it’s done right, there’s a special kind of magic in it.

    So butterfly collectors and those that love them will be pleased to learn that beginning this summer, in advance of Lolita’s 70th anniversary on September 15th, Vintage is reissuing all of Nabokov’s books, complete with new covers designed by Lit Hub favorite Na Kim, who is the art director of The Paris Review and a Creative Director at FSG.

    “Getting tasked with redesigning the Nabokov backlist is a dream project, albeit a daunting one,” Kim said in a statement.

    I wanted to come up with a design that felt new and classic at the same time, while remaining cohesive across the board.

    The designs aim to mimic the mysterious effortlessness in Nabokov’s writing that, to me, feels absolutely right yet defies analysis and dissection. I’ve always found there to be a playful aspect to the way Nabokov writes. It’s as though he’s inserted all this buoyancy, inside jokes, and little easter eggs for his own amusement, so I wanted to bring a lightness to the covers to aim at the quality in his writing.

    She also sought to honor “Nabokov’s personal taste,” by delving into the archives to find the author’s own correspondence around the original designs for Lolita:

    “What I did want to retain from the last redesigns is the tactile element, and using thick chunks of paint to sit on,” Nabokov explained.

    I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. If we cannot find that kind of artistic and virile painting, let us settle for an immaculate white jacket (rough texture paper instead of the usual glossy kind), with LOLITA in bold black lettering.

    The covers, while honoring Nabokov, are also very Kim, who is also a painter, and whose recent covers often experiment with thick hand-painted lines. It must also be said that we here at the blog factory officially approve of the choice of background color: Long live Lit Hub beige. Here are the first four redesigns in the series, which are now available wherever you buy books:

    Vintage Books; cover design by Na Kim Vintage Books; cover design by Na Kim Vintage Books; cover design by Na Kim Vintage Books; cover design by Na Kim

    Here’s what’s making us happy this week.

    Brittany Allen

    July 18, 2025, 10:09am

    This week, we’re fulfilling prophecies, and pledges to past selves. We bought the tickets and took the rides. Some of us into the archive. Some of us into the dungeon. And some of us out to greener pastures.

    Calvin Kasulke is thrilled to report that the long-awaited, lately released new Clipse album “absolutely delivers.” “Let God Sort Em Out,” is the fourth studio album from the Virginia-born hip-hop duo. Pharrell produced. Let it rip.

    James Folta stays into hyper specific archival projects. This week he’s been digging this community effort to document how many cigarettes appear in movies. (The website How Many Cigarettes tackles a similar beat.) “Whenever a movie has a cigarette appearing more than once every five minutes, it’s tagged a ‘REAL SMOKER MOVIE,’ which cracks me up,” says our resident librarian. “Despite having never been a smoker, I’ve become pretty invested.”

    Drew Broussard is “not even sorry” that his nice thing this week is another throwback web game, reminiscent of the good old web. Dark Fort places its users in a catacomb, where they must complete a mysterious quest. This solo RPG is part of the Mörk Borg extended universe, wherein apocalypse looms. You will have to ask Drew more about the details. If you can tear him away from the screen.

    Oliver Scialdone’s also revisiting the best things about being 14. “I’m rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Jillian because she’s never seen it,” our community editor reports. Turns out the WB’s best property does, in, fact hold up. Be warned, emulators—late 90s/early aughts cultural products have real Give-a-Mouse-a-Cookie potential. Oliver’s also been listening to lots of Garbage, and rereading Nana.

    Olivia Rutigliano went on an actual vacation. She and the partner visited St. Kitts and its breath-taking sister island, Nevis (“one of the most beautiful places imaginable”) and did absolutely no work, which we truly salute. “We went swimming and read books. (I burned my way through some Simenon, personally.) To quote the Go-Gos: ‘vacation, all I ever wanted.'”

    Molly Odintz went on a mind vacation, to Alienated Majesty Books. Our managing CrimeReads editor is thrilled to report that the indie houses “the best obscure literature collection in Austin.” Though she arrived for a book talk from hardcore legend Eugene Robinson, unexpected treats abounded. Real good anecdotes about real good weirdos.

    I’m grateful this week for a divine pairing. A pistachio popsicle, and Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness. One is a perfect summer treat, the other is a perfect summer story collection, following witty, tortured, outdoor women over and around the elaborate love hurdles they set themselves. Sentences as salty-sweet as my new favorite dessert.

    Wishing you a week of deep dives, new vistas, and pleasant memories of things past.

    10 radical works of fiction and nonfiction that inspired Kylie Cheung’s book on post-Dobbs violence.

    James Folta

    July 17, 2025, 2:45pm

    Kylie Cheung’s forthcoming book Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans is a searing investigation into the intersecting structures that control the lives of women and pregnant people. In her introduction, Cheung writes that the book “is my best attempt to contextualize the deeper impacts of abortion laws, particularly on endemic gender-based violence in our society.” The book is short but wide ranging, addressing the world post-Dobbs, the criminalization of pregnancy, the ways abusers excert cruelty and control, and how politicians have abandoned and failed vulnerable Americans. As Rita Smith of domesticshelters.org is quoted in the book, “We’re seeing a cultural shift in what the value of women’s lives is.”

    Cheung is a reporter for Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day, and was previously a staff reporter for Jezebel, where she covered a wide variety of issues. I loved Cheung’s news book, and was curious what other writing had inspired Cheung while she was working on Coercion.

    “What’s interesting,” she told me, “is the books that I immediately thought of as books that have influenced me weren’t necessarily about abortion or reproductive rights directly.” This is a reflection of how she thinks about abortion, as not “this single issue that exists in a silo” but rather something shaped by a “huge confluence of systems of power.”

    In examining abortion and the violence inflicted on women and pregnant people through a wider lens, Cheung told me she was explicitly “challenging this idea that gender-based violence only takes form as interpersonal violence,” and instead “demonstrating how the state itself can be an abuser.” She wanted to write a book “that explicitly takes the position that abortion bans are state violence and that the anti-abortion movement’s position is a fundamentally violent one.”

    Liberating Abortion by Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone and Relinquished by Gretchen Sisson

    Cheung found inspiration in Liberating Abortion and Relinquished, two books that broadened her thinking about the issues around abortion care and pregnancy.

    Relinquished in particular, “really complicates these narratives you’re told where adoption is the alternative to abortion,” Cheung told me. Adoption is not a simple option, especially given an American context where so many people lack resources and support. In practice adoption is not a simple solution, but instead an “emotionally complicated and capitalist industry,” as Cheung put it.

    Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World by Leslie Kern

    In the same vein of thinking more broadly about the structures around anti-abortionists’ desire to control the lives of pregnant people, Cheung recommended Feminist City by the feminist geographer Leslie Kern. The book explores not only how cities fail women through their design, but also offers hopeful solutions by imagining ways we can build more safe, welcoming, and just cities.

    “It was just so eye-opening for me,” Cheung said, “how cities and urban planning, public life, and everyday features of life outside of the house are inherently exclusionary toward women and pregnant people and mothers.”

    Kern’s emphasis on imagining a better future was something Cheung tries to carry into her own work. “It was inspirational for me,” she said, “to think about building something new, beyond just being critical of things all day.”

    Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law by Dean Spade

    Cheung’s thinking about what solutions might looks like was also inspired by Dean Spade’s book Normal Life, which articulates a forceful challenge to the legal equality framework for social change, and champions more grassroots approaches to justice and safety that go beyond merely seeking state recognition of rights.

    Cheung told me that this book came to her at a time, “when I was just starting to have doubts about the Democratic Party and neoliberal identity politics, and this notion that women and queer people and marginalized groups need identity-based representation more than we need redistributional policies” was striking to her.

    She was careful to stress that she thinks rights are important, but that thinking of them as the only way forward “coexists with the reality that under that state of things, our needs were not being met and people were being criminalized.” This is a way of thinking that “has so many cracks and fissures where so many different vulnerable people will fall through those cracks,” she said.

    Coercion has some forceful critiques of not just the right and the anti-abortion movement in America, but also the ways that “Democrats have failed us while weaponizing fear in really coercive ways,” Cheung said. And while they can’t shoulder the blame completely, or even most of it, “a lot of where we are today is because of Democratic fecklessness or telling people not to dream bigger,” she said.

    A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk

    We talked a lot about Rachel Cusk, and how beautiful and attentive her writing is. “It takes me forever to read her books,” Cheung said, “because every other sentence, I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s the most amazing sentence.’”

    Cheung singled out A Life’s Work as a “book that really changed my life.” Cusk is “very honest about these things,” Cheung said, “that you’re not supposed to be honest about.”

    In A Life’s Work, Cheung “learned so much about the fundamental and almost mundane kind of violence and terror of being pregnant even under the best and most ideal circumstances.”

    Coercion is very attentive to these small indignities too. In addition to discussion of policy and statistics, Cheung’s book is full of evocative, searing details. She credits Cusk with illuminating the personal side of what she writes about.

    “I’ve just spent so much time reporting on the policies,” Cheung said, “but I think before reading [A Life’s Work], I hadn’t really thought that deeply about how mysterious and unsettling pregnancy can be.”

    My Work by Olga Ravn

    Another book that reframed how Cheung thought about pregnancy, parenting, and writing was Olga Ravn’s My Work, a novel about a woman who is lost after giving birth and turns to literature to cope.

    Becoming a parent is something that “will obviously disrupt your ability to produce or not feel like you’re being selfish when you’re writing,” Chueng said, something that she’s experienced some degree of in her own life, albeit to a much lesser extent: “I already feel that now when I’m not spending enough time with my friends.”

    Perfect Victims And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd

    One of the most powerful sections of Coercion explores the overlaps in tactics and motivations between anti-abortion state violence and anti-Palestinian state violence. Cheung talked to me at length about how much she loves Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, his book on Palestinian dignity that weaves together history, personal experience, and reporting. The book, Cheung said, combines El-Kurd’s “brilliant political mind and the moral clarity of his arguments.”

    Cheung’s thinking on Palestine and on abortion is linked, she said, and Coercion “is very much about understanding state violence and gender-based violence as conjoined.” The two coercive agendas share a way of seeing the world and operating in it. Cheung told me that she’s “always seen imperialism and Israel’s occupation and genocide of Palestine as similarly co-opting a lot of the tactics of abusers and people who perpetrate gender-based violence.”

    El-Kurd describes the ways that Palestinians, like victims of sexual assault, are made to “audition for credibility or humanity.” To be a victim in these contexts is to be “under cross-examination,” Cheung said, “You’re the one who is begging for these basic components of respect and humanity that people, your oppressors, are just born holding.”

    Know My Name by Chanel Miller

    Chanel Miller’s memoir about her own trauma and transformation was a book that reminded Cheung to not forget the individuals in her writing. Cheung told me about how much she admired Miller’s “brilliance as a storyteller, how funny she is, and the silliness of the book.” Miller’s deeply personal writing struck Cheung too, especially the “very relatable nonlinear nature of her healing.”

    Miller’s book is a reminder to be wary of an over reliance on statistics, since “there’s this aspect of humanity that gets in some ways erased when you’re just like, ‘look at all of these horrible statistics.’”

    The Feminist and the Sex Offender by Judith Levine and Erica Meiners and The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan

    Cheung credits both of The Feminist and The Sex Offender and The Right to Sex for challenging her thinking on topics she has covered widely. The Feminist and the Sex Offender in particular made Cheung rethink how the American legal system affects both victims and the accused. “What does justice for them look like?” Cheung told me.

    And Srinivasan’s book, “takes on so many daring topics about sex, about violence, about attraction, sex work, sex education, criminalization,” Cheung said, “and presents so many perspectives that are all really compelling and yet often at odds with each other.”

    It’s the sort of complex thinking that defies simple explanations, and the kind of writing that Cheung wants to do in her own work. She tries to be incisively “challenging to a lot of preconceived beliefs,” as she put it.

    Coercion does just that, asking the reader to consider  how the web of different systems and social structures enable more entrapping forms of violence and control. Coercion is a short and direct book, offering an overview of the anti-abortion movement’s ideology of violence, and the scale of the coercive agenda is overwhelming and maddening.

    The anti-abortion struggle, Cheung told me, is “a matter of life, whether that’s agency over your life, or the ability to pursue a dignified life, or the ability to escape your abuser, or the ability to survive.” It’s also a matter of death, she said, “with so many material consequences for pregnant people, for victims of domestic violence, for those who have like the least resources under capitalism and white supremacy.”

    Cheung’s writing is as clear and decisive as a thunderclap, guided by the force of her convictions and the clarity of her arguments. She’s a writer who knows what she believes, and her prose is undaunted.

    “I like how I write,” she told me, “and I think that my anger, and the things that I feel, and the things that I believe, and my outrage really comes through. I don’t know how to write in any other way.”

    Is Brad Lander’s original Shakespeare in the Park sonnet any good?

    James Folta

    July 17, 2025, 2:32pm

    I’ve updated this article to include Lander’s sonnet co-writer Chloe Chik, and links to previous sonnets Lander has performed.

    Brad Lander’s having a great summer. From bravely standing up to ICE thugs, to becoming best buddies with mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, to releasing one of my favorite campaign videos of all time, the NYC comptroller is doing great right now.

    He was also invited to the grand opening of the The Public Theater’s newly refurbished Delacorte Theater. The ribbon-cutting was attended by other celebrities and supporters, and just before this season’s Shakespeare in the Park program is set to open on August 7th with performances of Twelfth Night.

    Choosing to forgo the standard speech, Lander instead composed an original sonnet for the Delacorte’s opening, captured here:

    I’ve transcribed the sonnet below, too, if you’d prefer to read it.

    Lander’s sonnets, which he co-writes with his press secretary Chloe Chik, have been a feature at Shakespeare in the Park openings for years. Here’s one from 2023, and two from 2022—memorized too, a poet and performer.

    I’ll admit that when someone announces they’ve composed an original poem for an occasion, my stomach tends to flip in fear. We’ve all been burned by a family member who penned a cheeky limerick for Thanksgiving or a best man who is recalling the groom’s college years in verse. But for a public official turned poet, I think Lander did pretty well.

    Is this the traditional 14 line, iambic pentameter form we studied in school? Not by my scansion. It looks like Lander went a little free-verse on us, which is fine, but does not a sonnet make. I have to break out the red pen and dock a few points.

    I like starting with the direct parody of Shakespeare, it’s a smart way to set the stage and get everyone onboard with some quick laughs. I like the twist of “quite predictable fortune,” and “raccoons” is a fun specific—appreciate the choice to not reach for the low-hanging fruit of pigeons or rats, NYC’s perennial punching bags.

    The parody gets dropped pretty quickly, which I get since Hamlet’s sonnet goes dark at the point Lander veers from the Shakespeare. I get why he wouldn’t want to riff on death and sleep at a theater celebration, but more direct parody would have served the poem, I think. The lines reimagining Shakespeare are fun, and if you’re reading for a crowd of dedicated Bard-heads, why not give ‘em what they want?

    The turn in the middle from jokey to serious is decently well handled, though I maybe would have committed harder to one lane or the other. Lander’s jokes are a bit better than his more serious bars, at least to my ear.

    Though I will say, there are some nice turns of phrase here. I like describing the city as “these isles” and the couplet, “But also that sometimes good does prevail/In a city perchance that we could all afford” definitely got a quiet “hell yeah” from me (I would be more exuberant, but I work from home and am trying to be a good neighbor).

    The performance? Pretty good too. A little more emphasis here and there would help to sell the punchlines and the slant rhymes a little better, but I’m also very won over by his Park Slope dad charm.

    Overall, I give this is a solid B+. Well done! I can’t wait to read more of your sonnets—do one about being comptroller next!


    Brad Lander’s Sonnet 1*

    To renovate or not to renovate, that was the question,
    Whether ’twas nobler in this space to suffer
    The slings and arrows of quite predictable fortune,
    Or to take arms against the sea of raccoons
    And by construction thwart them.
    Against the envy of less happier lands,
    This blessed park, this earth, this realm, these isles ,
    Will now delight new generations,
    And have dressing room rooms that don’t drown actors’ style.
    And what a time to reopen this stage,
    With enemies of culture on the prowl,
    Pitting fear and faux populist rage
    Against empathy and attack most foul.
    Our tyrant locks up immigrants, comptrollers too,
    And sows chaos no matter the cost,
    so, what’s a public theater to do,
    To ensure that our democracy is not lost?
    Happily one answer is right here,
    In new seats and stage for all New York to see,
    Our hearts and our democracy restored through Shakespeare,
    That uplifts us all for free.
    Here we’ll see that leaders too often fail,
    And betray the noble goals that once they swore,
    But also that sometimes good does prevail,
    In a city perchance that we could all afford.
    History’s lessons are our priceless treasure from The Bard,
    Ne’er more important than when listening to them is hard.
    With that hopeful message, I must end this rhyme,
    So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

    The Defense Department wants to ban hundreds of books. Here are the weirdest titles.

    Brittany Allen

    July 16, 2025, 2:25pm

    The Trump administration has moved to ban 596 books from schools that serve military children. This is in addition to all their ongoing support for state book bans. Though it’s uniquely upsetting because military schools can be seen as arms of the government, where free speech protections can be harder to protect.

    Threatened titles include “children’s biographies of trailblazing transgender public figures. An award-winning novel reflecting on what it is like to be Black in America,” and “a series of graphic novels about the love story between a teenage gay couple.”

    To meet their apparent quota, Defense Department (DD) censors seem to have applied a control F search to the whole Library of Congress. YA books with “gender,” “trans,” “racist,” “identity,” or any acronym in the title have been scrubbed from school shelves.

    Counter or contextualizing histories that challenge white supremacy, like Paul Ortiz’s An African American History and Latinx History of the United States, are also on the chopping block. Ditto rhetorical question titles that tease a challenge to hegemony. Like Ronald D. Lankford’s Are America’s Wealthy Too Powerful?

    All of this is pure trash, of course. But some of the censored books are real curveballs. Here are a few that surprised me on the government’s latest list.

    a burning

    Megha Majumdar, A Burning

    Majumdar’s thrilling three-hander debuted five years ago to great acclaim. It dances with big themes re: gender, class, and political extremism. But as a literary novel—one pitched at adults, no less—it’s extra bizarre to find this one in the government’s cross-hairs.

    What “ideology,” DD?

    Meagan Brothers, Debbie Harry Sings in French

    This YA book charts a young person’s coming-of-age under the only benevolent influence of your favorite 80s pop-punk icon.

    What gives, DD? Do you just hate fun?

    Kai Cheng Tom, From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea

    This beautifully illustrated children’s book follows a young person with shape-shifting powers. The story affirms gender-queerness and gender-questioning. But its allegory can also be read as a general urge to embrace one’s contradictions. Also, Julie Andrews reads the audio book.

    Really, DD? You’re scared of Maria von Trapp?

    Ann Braden, Flight of the Puffin

    This novel, from the former middle school teacher and grassroots activist Ann Braden, is about bullying. It follows four kids around the country as they investigate bad habits and embrace small acts of kindness. Though I can’t emulate their example here, this message seems pretty innocuous to me.

    But maybe this one’s on the outs because it’s at cross-purposes with the military in general…?

    Robie Harris & Michael Emberley, It’s Perfectly Normal

    This book, a big one on my childhood shelves, first came out in 1994. And as the title suggests, it offers a pretty innocuous intro to all the things a young body can go through.

    But I guess you’re anti puberty, too? Huh, DD?

    Virginia Woolf, Orlando

    On its publication in the previous century, Orlando enjoyed a fair bit of controversy for its allusions to same-sex love and strategic censor-dodging. The academy has since celebrated the novel with abundant queer readings. That said, it’s fiction. For grown-ups.

    Also, more threats on Julie Andrews-related texts? Not in this house!

    Grace Ellis & ND Stevenson & Shannon Watters & Gus Allen, Lumberjanes

    I’ll be honest. I guess I have to thank the DD censors for pointing me to this series, which was not on my radar but looks like the kind of thing that would have ruined my grades in middle school. Following a set of punk-rock preteens who solve mysteries and wail on monsters at their bespoke summer camp, this series has been described as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Gravity Falls.” And I list it here for the same reason I list the others: I actually think more kids should have copies of this book.

    Surprise! You’ve been AGENDA’d!

    You can read the rest of the list of unobjectionable titles the government wants to take away from its military students here, and buy them in abundance on your own free time.

    In the meanwhile, we send warm thoughts and props to the families fighting these bans.

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