Lit Hub Daily: August 13, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1946, H.G. Wells dies.
- Margaret Grace Myers examines the grim legacy of Ronald Reagan and how the AIDS epidemic laid the foundations for sex ed in America. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Hunger now governs time. It becomes the unrelenting measure by which each hour is known.” Alaa Alqaisi on life in Gaza through the lens of WB Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Sam Wachman on the challenges of writing a novel about the war in Ukraine and literature as “a force for peace and solidarity.” | Lit Hub Craft
- Tobias Wolff reflects back on 30 years of Adrienne Salinger’s Teenagers in Their Bedrooms: “The humanity of these young faces implies a depth of feeling and experience that their histories confirm.” | Lit Hub Photography
- Tim Queeney explores ropemaking, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Mocha Dick, the real life inspiration behind Herman Melville’s iconic white whale. | Lit Hub History
- “How are free people supposed to stay free? One short answer: don’t trust anyone over thirty.” On Thomas Paine’s guide to fighting dictatorship. | Lit Hub Politics
- Jane Ciabattari talks to Jessica Francis Kane about exploring the life of Penelope Fitzgerald through fiction. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “What had gone wrong with me didn’t start out with the car. It didn’t end with the car, but the car played a serious part.” Read from C. Mallon’s new novel, Dogs. | Lit Hub Fiction
- On the existential horrors of storytelling through AI companionship. | Wired
- “The scenes of prison break from Khiam to Sednaya offer us a glimpse into a possible, yet precarious freedom.” The trajectory of prison liberation and abolition across the Middle East. | The Baffler
- Riley MacLeod plays Tiny Bookshop, a bookstore management simulation game. | Aftermath
- “After the disastrous meeting, he began asking around about where an original golden ticket from the 1971 Willy Wonka movie, a highly valuable collector’s item, could be pawned.” What do crypto bros have to do with Ronald Dahl? It’s a (really) wild story. | New York Magazine
- Take a look at some of Mary Ruefle’s erasure texts, which she’s been making “almost daily” since 1998. | The Paris Review
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