Fridays, the week’s mullet: business in the front, and leisure in the back.
Hope you have a great weekend, with your loved ones and your community, and I’ll see you back here on Monday.
The first nice thing this week is an institutional birthday.
Thanks to the attentive ministrations of our dear Drew Broussard, it’s officially been one year since we launched The Lit Hub Podcast! (“And I didn’t acknowledge it at all in the episode because I locked it before I realized and don’t have time to go fix it.” —Drew)
Our host with the most is grateful for every guest, supporter, and listener. We at Lit Hub are grateful for Drew. With warmth and wit, he’s stewarded us through the publisher’s marketplace, “anticipation season“, and a Nancy Drew convention. We can’t wait to hear where he’ll take us next, and hope you’ll keep tuning in to find out.
The rest of us are strolling into fall with an eye to earthly delights. It’s the simple things keeping us going this week—fresh air, card games, local heroes, and sweet treats.
Jessie Gaynor’s kid has gotten into playing Uno, and she is delighted to report to any adults who may have forgotten that “Uno still rules.”
In other good competition news, Molly Odintz’s old high school pal Jimmy Talarico is running for Texas Senate, on a workers’ rights platform. This seminarian and former public school teacher has “led the fight against the billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians who have taken over Texas.” So Lone Star voters, check him out.
In nice news from the interior, Emily Temple has been going on hour long morning walks, and “can recommend.”
Another flaneur, James Folta, has been spending some happy hours with the latest issue of the New York Review of Architecture. “Such great, fun, and smart writing, plus it’s worker owned and cooperatively run,” says this staffer. And though its pages may favor Bauhaus nerds, James assures us that you don’t necessarily have to be into architecture to get something out of every “gorgeous” issue.
And Olivia Rutigliano had an epic ice cream sundae for two (but de facto, for one). “Get a load of this: three scoops of ice cream (vanilla, brownie batter, and cookie batter) with whipped cream and hot fudge, over a bed of fudge-soaked brownie pieces.” I’m listening, Seattle. “And a cherry, but whose favorite part is that.”
My happy thing this week was a day at the movies. With the above-mentioned James Folta(!), I, Brittany Allen, attended a screening of The Summer Book, Charlie McDowell’s faithful adaptation of the beloved Tove Jansson novel.
Jansson’s Summer Book is about as perfect as novels get—a slim, specific coming-of-age story. The screen treatment brings us Glenn Close in fine Scandinavian grandmother form, a lot of sweeping island vistas, and a very scrappy young actor named Emily Matthews.
The Summer Book is in limited release starting this Friday in some cities, and should fall under a Kanopy near you not long after. It’s a lovely film to mark the end of summer with. Just be sure to pair it with the source, for sauce.
Wishing you an easy start to fall. May you celebrate a little something every day.
Today, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction. Then ten titles were selected from a pool of 434 books submitted for consideration by their publishers. This year’s judges for Fiction are Rumaan Alam (Chair), Debra Magpie Earling, Attica Locke, Elizabeth McCracken, and Cody Morrison.
The finalists in all categories will be announced on Tuesday, October 7, and the winners revealed at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 19.
In the meantime, here’s the longlist:
Rabih Alameddine, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
Grove Press / Grove Atlantic
Susan Choi, Flashlight
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness
Mariner Books / HarperCollins Publishers
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, The Sisters
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Kevin Moffett, Only Son
McSweeney’s
Karen Russell, The Antidote
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Ethan Rutherford, North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
A Strange Object / Deep Vellum Publishing
Bryan Washington, Palaver
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Joy Williams, The Pelican Child
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Right after college, I moved to San Francisco, a city where I knew one person. I had a lonely time at first, and in particular I struggled to stay connected to the friends I no longer shared a campus with. I wasn’t very good at calling people on the phone and my email correspondences were sporadic at best. But what I did have was my Reader Crew, a group of friends who were all devoted to Google Reader.
Some of you have already lit up at the mention of Google Reader—it’s got a devoted following of mourners. Reader was a short-lived aggregator of RSS feeds (RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”). Sites can publish RSS feeds which allow you to access that sites content in another program, called a reader, where you can scroll, sort, and search. These readers pull together any feeds you curate, keeping them updated and tracked. RSS feeds tend to be the posts and articles from a site—scroll down to the bottom of this page and you can see ours—but most RSS readers can also handle newsletters, Tumblrs, and even specific Google searches can rendered in RSS.
Google’s Reader was special because it had some very light social aspects: you were able to follow other people, who could share things from their own feeds into your feed, with or without a small bit of commentary. You could comment on or “like” these shares, but that was about it. There was no big public feed of everyone’s stuff, there was no push to discover other users, and there was no way to make content for Reader. It was just curation and light commentary, if you wanted it.
Molly White wrote a great piece recently for her newsletter that describes RSS aggregation as “curating your own newspaper,” and this was my Reader Crew’s experience. My feed felt like a magazine I was editing, with a small group of friends popping in to guest edit every now and then. It was small, pleasant, and slow.
We were pretty bereft when Google killed Reader, as were many other devotees. It’s hard to replace. Reader was similar to social media, where you can also curate what you’re reading, but without the massive public news feeds and the jockeying for attention. Reader’s more intimate size also felt a bit like a group chat, maybe, but less chaotic and ever-present.
Thankfully, we discovered The Old Reader, which aims to recreate the Google-axed experience and does it admirably well. If you miss Reader, it’s worth a look. But if you’re just starting out with RSS, don’t stress too much about which program to use. There are a lot of free and cheap options that others have aggregated—like Molly White’s from above. Really the question comes down to interface: what is pleasant for you to use and look at? But it’s easy to import and export your list of feeds, so you can always bop around if you want.
I really recommend giving RSS a try, especially if you’re tired of endless feeds that feel like constant, multidirectional fire hoses. I love RSS primarily because you can curate who and what you want to hear from. The pacing is self directed too, and never overwhelming. It feels like riding a bike: fast enough to get somewhere, but slow that the ride is enjoyable. And like reading, you control the frame rate, and can stop, slow down, or go back in your feed if you need to. Which is unlike the stationary bike of social media, where some red-pilled millionaire engineer is cranking a dial to make you peddle faster. Plus, you can get to the end of your RSS feeds, unlike a social scroll which is endless by design.
This scale and pacing issue seems to be part of why RSS never caught on with Silicon Valley business types. It’s a tech that was never flashy or engaging enough. David Pierce wrote an interesting deep dive for The Verge called “Who killed Google Reader?” that reveals how executives never got what was so special about Reader, and had it out for the product from the start. They saw it as “a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology” and “in meeting after meeting, they’d ask why Reader wasn’t just a tab in the Gmail app.”
It’s another reason to love RSS: seems like the tech lords hate it.
When you’re a businessman making dollar-sign eyes at things like Twitter and Facebook, you’re certainly going to be less horny about a product that is slower and less addicting. RSS lacks a stickiness that keeps you compelled to go back. It’s much closer to a tool, allowing you to create something unique and private, that is only as useful or enjoyable as you make it.
We need a new word other than “feed” to describe RSS. A “feed” is for molten metals extruded along an assembly line, or for bullets pumped into a machine gun. Maybe we should start calling the aggregation of RSS feeds “fields” or “pastures”: contained spaces where you can plant and harvest as you like, with no one butting in unless they’re invited.
Today, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Then ten titles were selected from a pool of 652 books submitted for consideration by their publishers. This year’s judges for Nonfiction are Heather Kathleen Moody Hall, Tiya Miles (Chair), Raj Patel, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Eli Saslow.
The finalists in all categories will be announced on Tuesday, October 7, and the winners revealed at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 19.
In the meantime, here’s the longlist:
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Caleb Gayle, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
Ecco / HarperCollins Publishers
Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising
Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House
Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Lana Lin, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam
Dorothy, a publishing project
Ben Ratliff, Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening
Graywolf Press
Claudia Rowe, Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care
Abrams Press / Abrams
Jordan Thomas, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life
Milkweed Editions
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