Lit Hub Daily: August 21, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1762, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is born.
- Learning about grief from the ghost of Sylvia Plath: “Although we may want to flee from what makes us afraid, it’s so often that these ghosts are the only ones who can help us move through the spaces of discomfort and pain.” | Lit Hub Craft
- “Laughing at death and dying would have been preposterous to me before knowing Max.” E. K. Schrader reflects on 10 years without Max Ritvo. | Lit Hub Biography
-
Anjet Daanje’s The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Joby Warrick’s The Jackal, and Dorthe Nors’ Range all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- Why television is the serious writer’s ally and not just a guilty pleasure. | Lit Hub Craft
- What Mark Twain has to do with the rise and fall of subscription publishing (and the birth of mass media). | Lit Hub History
- Faraaz Mahomed talks to marrying the psychological with the personal and the political in his debut novel, Mother/Land. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “I medicate myself with an Asahi and a packet of sour gummy worms to avoid dwelling on this morbid thought for too long.” Read from Momo Yamaguchi’s debut novel, Hello, Limerence. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Lauren Michele Jackson on the reduction of Jason Arday: “Arday is dead and still being propped up as an example of various crises, by commentators unconcerned with his memory.” | The New Yorker
- Mitch Therieau explains the lure of “lore.” | The New York Times Magazine
- Grace Byron, Dorothea Lasky, Philip Ball, and more write about astrology. | Broadcast
- Nozomi Naoi explores the visual history of Japan’s dreamy department stores. | The MIT Press Reader
- [Sarah] Cavar examines “the minor literatures of transMad life.” | Full Stop
- People love to argue about The Phantom of the Opera. | JSTOR Daily
Article continues after advertisement
