“Imagine a wealthy Oxbridge don giving their teenager a blank check for their Brontë birthday bash and you might begin to grasp the vision.” Emily Van Duyne reviews Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.
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In our Letters from Minnesota series, writers, organizers, and activists on the ground in Minnesota bear witness to ICE and American authoritarianism. Today, read dispatches from Kao Kalia Yang on preparing for the worst with her children, Jim Moore on echoes of protests past, and Katherine Packert Burke on “why we will win.”
In our Letters from Minnesota series, writers, organizers, and activists on the ground in Minnesota bear witness to ICE and American authoritarianism. Today, read dispatches from Kao Kalia Yang on preparing for the worst with her children, Jim Moore on echoes of protests past, and Katherine Packert Burke on “why we will win.”
James Folta talks to Minneapolis bookseller Angela Schwesnedl:
“Angela Schwesnedl from Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis picked up my phone call on Saturday almost two hours to the minute after Alex Pretti was murdered in the street by ICE officers.
‘If you haven’t seen the video, don’t,’ she told me. ‘It’s an execution.’
We had made a plan the day before to talk about Friday’s huge ICE Out protest, march, and general strike against the federal occupation, but Alex Pretti was dead, and we began in somber sadness. The early reports of the murder would continue to filter out to us, to me hunched in a friend’s small office in New York while taking notes, and to her in the back of a Minneapolis store while managing diaper distribution.”
“We wear whistles now. Mine is bright yellow and plastic and weighs barely enough to dangle from its string. I carry it in my pocket. Others wear theirs like an amulet. Under any other circumstance, my whistle would be mistaken for a Christmas-tree ornament, a birthday-party favor, or a second-hand Fisher-Price toy. It looks amateur, but the noise it makes is contractor grade.
The neighbors all carry one. Some whistles are clearly brand-new—an overnight Amazon Prime purchase—others a leftover from a long-ago summer lifeguard job. In blaze-orange safety vests and down puffers, we line the streets around our schools each morning and afternoon, standing watch for ICE caravans, little plumes of frozen breath rising from beneath our hoods.”
Anne Margaret Castro explains why Heated Rivalry is the perfect romance novel adaptation.
This year at Literary Hub, we published the tenth iteration of a fan favorite end of year list: the best book covers of the year, as chosen by some of our favorite book cover designers. When we realized we had a decade of data about the best book covers, we knew what we needed to do. These are the 75 best ranked book covers of the decade, because we know you live for the aesthetic.
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William Butler Yeats is often taught through a handful of familiar poems, but beneath that canon was a lifelong engagement with mysticism, divination, symbolism, and systems of belief that shaped how he understood history and the creative imagination. A new JSTOR Daily article by Gus Mitchell traces how these ideas informed his poetry as central ways of thinking and learning about the world.
If you’re looking to start the year by reading something a little unexpected, this one’s worth your time! And if pieces like this are your kind of reading, the JSTOR Daily newsletter delivers stories grounded in scholarship straight to your inbox.
Image: William Rothenstein, William Butler Yeats, 1898. Lithograph. The Cleveland Museum of Art.
“‘All poets are liars,’ my play begins. Plato was probably right. With this enfeebled mind my only recourse is poetry.”
Read “In Shadow, Who Made These Words,” a poem by Bianca Stone from the collection The Near and Distant World.
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On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renée Nicole Good
Renée Nicole Good was a poet, writer, wife, and mother of three. She was killed on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis after being shot by an ICE agent.
Born and raised in Colorado, Renée described herself on social media simply as a poet and writer and wife and mom. She studied creative writing at Old Dominion University and, in 2020, received the Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize recognition that helped her work reach readers beyond her immediate community.
Those who knew her remember Renée as compassionate, loving, and deeply creative. She cared fiercely for her children, her partners, and the people around her. Her mother described her as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” and loved ones say her life was shaped by caregiving, curiosity, and art.
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Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered yesterday by ICE, also won the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020 for a poem called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” which you can read here.
You can donate in support of her wife and son here.
Not sure what to read this year? Try one (or all) of the 314 books we’re most looking forward to in 2026.