Lit Hub Daily: Chester Himes, Booker Prize and New Fiction

By Marcus Bennett

Chester Himes died in 1984, the date Lit Hub’s Daily edition for November 12, 2026 places at the top.

Lit Hub’s roundup assembles 16 listed features across criticism, history, reading lists, politics, reporting and book reviews, and draws on seven other publications as linked sources.

Criticism and close reading

Adam Gopnik supplies the lead criticism in Lit Hub with “An Ode to the Lost Generation,” marking the centenary of The Sun Also Rises. He considers what has kept the novel interesting after 100 years despite “some barbed wire and thorns in the perimeter of its effects, ones that must be leapt past and over.”

Katrina Dodson’s “The Annotated Nightstand” in Lit Hub’s Criticism section names Nicholas Boggs, Tom Overton and Mónica de la Torre among the authors she is reading now and next.

Book Marks gathers five reviews. One makes the case for Amazons within DeLillo’s work: “I propose that, far from being an outlier in DeLillo’s twentieth-century canon, [Amazons] is central to his work.”

Jamie Hood, writing for The New Yorker, considers Courtney Bush’s Learning, K Chiucarello’s Nanny Nanny and the joys and perils of working in childcare. Public Books describes The Adolescent as Dostoevsky’s greatest flop and says: “This is a testament to both its genuine incoherence and its distinctly experimental aesthetics.”

The Paris Review presents Barbara Trapido in conversation with Rosa Lyster about Brother of the More Famous Jack, 30 years on. Trapido says: “I suppose I invented them because I wanted some exciting pretend friends.”

New fiction and reading lists

Lit Hub’s Reading Lists section carries Maris Kreizman’s 10 overlooked debut novels, while its Bookstores section lists this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers in both fiction and nonfiction.

Karabi Acharya, also in Reading Lists, recommends books to help readers understand multiracial America, with titles by Barack Obama, Jose Antonio Vargas and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others.

Lit Hub’s Fiction section publishes an extract from Avni Doshi’s new novel, The First House. Doshi writes: “When my husband comes into the bedroom we have shared for thirteen years and tells me he doesn’t want to be married anymore, I reach for my neck. My head is missing.”

History, technology and public argument

Lit Hub’s History section traces Russian defector Boris Krukoff and his plunder of the Amazon in the name of American pharmaceuticals.

Lit Hub’s Politics section asks whether the world could survive a war between two global superpowers. It warns: “No conflict in the world today has the capacity, if miscalculated, of bringing ruin upon us all, like the one between the United States and China.”

Noema has Ben Bariach and Harry Law consider the danger of the AI swarm. Wired reports: “AO3 is still down, and the internet’s become a battleground for writers versus readers.” Lit Hub also invites readers to keep voting as its quarterfinals narrow the field for “The Best Literary TV Adaptation of All Time.”

What does this issue change for readers?

For readers, the roundup offers several routes into literary debate rather than a single theme: a centenary reassessment of The Sun Also Rises, 10 overlooked debuts, books about multiracial America and a live adaptation vote.

The six quoted passages move from the case for DeLillo’s Amazons to Dostoevsky’s “greatest flop,” giving criticism a visible range of verdicts and a sharper sense of disagreement across the linked reviews.

The Guardian gives readers Lisa Allardice’s profile of new Booker Prize winner M John Harrison, while Lit Hub’s quarterfinal adaptation vote remains open for further voting.