Lit Hub Daily: April 22, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1892, The Awakening by Kate Chopin is published.
- Caroline Bicks unearths the word “clitter” and other wild discoveries while reading the first draft of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. | Lit Hub Criticism
- What happens to writers when they don’t write? | Lit Hub Craft
- Megan Garbe considers placelessness, pop culture, and the panopticon of spectacle. | Lit Hub Politics
- On Shakespeare’s commas in translation: “You don’t mess around with them wantonly, for rhythm or breathing or whatever.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Carissa Veliz traces the history (and future) of prophetic predictions. | Lit Hub History
- To continue our series in honor of National Poetry Month, today we think you should read Carson Jordan’s “Permiso.” | Lit Hub Poetry
- “As writers, our minds and hearts go from story to story like blossom to blossom picking up the bits and pieces of answers to our questions.” What honeybees can teach about writing. | Lit Hub Craft
- “The fantasy of chaining myself to a redwood / as the distance between my body and the chainsaw / decreases.” Read a poem by Christopher Kondrich from the collection, Tread Upon. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “There had been many hotel rooms for the adulterers, currently peacefully asleep in a large white bed.” Read from Sophie Mackintosh’s new novel, Permanence. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Noah Hawley reflects on his time at Jeff Bezos’ “Campfire retreat”: “When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.” | The Atlantic
- “The first storyteller of my life is losing her stories.” In her forthcoming book, Jesmyn Ward reflects on translating her early life on the page. | Vanity Fair
- Jess Libow considers recent books about hypochondria: “As such, they offer illness narratives that are less accounts of sickness itself than reckonings with medicine’s limitations.” | Public Books
- How early robots in the US evolved from symbols of revolt into racialized figures tied to labor and the legacy of slavery. | JSTOR Daily
- Hua Hsu considers Karen Tei Yamashita’s Questions 27 & 28. | The New Yorker
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