Lit Hub Daily: August 26, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1914, Julio Cortázar is born.
- Long live Dolly Parton, American icon, giver of books. | Lit Hub
- Catherine Lacey looks at Montserrat Roig’s Goodbye Ramona, a classic of antifascist Catalan literature. | Lit Hub Criticism
- How America uses audio to mythologize itself, from radio to podcasts, in its 250th year. | Lit Hub History
- “Translation is a mutation of language, but not direct replication; something happens in the process that shifts the direction of the ideas.” Jessica Sequeira on translating Vlady Kociancich’s The Eighth Wonder. | Lit Hub On Translation
- Drew Buxton recommends novels about obsessive athletes by Julie Otskuka, Ashton Politanoff, Quan Barry, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “For nearly that whole time, popular fictions have been trying to make American history more palatable. Girlhood fictions…perform that flavor-enhancing role in particularly powerful ways.” Examining white girlhood through Anne of Green Gables. | Lit Hub History
- Why American bureaucracy gives time theft a new meaning. | Lit Hub Politics
- “The last time I saw my mother, she walked me to the door to say goodbye.” Read from Andrea Bajani’s novel The Anniversary, translated by Geoffrey Brock. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Dolly Parton (whose Imagination Library has delivered more than 200 million free books to babies and young children) has died at 80. | The New York Times
- “Armed with French theory, my adult self transformed this denial of sexual orientation into a progressive rejection of all categories and binaries.” David Sessions on the decline and fall of his lavender marriage. | The Point
- Yiyun Li examines history and war through Qian Zhongshu’s novel, Fortress Besieged. | New York Review of Books
- Malavika Kannan, Missouri Williams, and other authors with recent campus novels explore the appeal of setting a story in academia. | Cultured
- If anyone owns AI, maybe it should be the public. | Jacobin
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