The Independent Scholar

The Independent Scholar - May 17, 2026

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In this week's issue:

  • Becca Rothfeld argues Anglophone publishing ignored Marlen Haushofer for decades — despite The Wall being a postwar classic in German-speaking Europe
  • Ben Lerner's new novel has its unnamed narrator drop his phone in a hotel sink and then publish a fabricated interview from memory — reviewed as an "outrageous riff" on Walter Benjamin's angel of history
  • A previously unpublished Donald Kagan interview on Thucydides surfaces five years after his death, exactly as Xi Jinping reportedly cites Thucydides to Trump
  • Ann Patchett and a fired Rutherford County library director honored by PEN; an Italian communist party branch demands Eshkol Nevo be excluded from a festival over his grandfather's politics
  • Sam Kahn on why the tech billionaires ramming Heinlein and Asimov "down everybody's throat" is a literary-critical problem, not just a cultural one

    • Good reading weather. Dig in.

    ...more
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    The Independent ScholarBy Julia Murphy