Lit Hub Daily: August 4, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1875, Hans Christian Andersen dies.
- Aaron Boehmer examines the hope in human connection and Octavia Butler’s “speech sounds.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- What Jane Austen’s most mundane possessions reveal about her literary (and life) ethos. | Lit Hub Biography
- Nell Stevens on a 19th-century scandal and the exploration of different worlds through fiction: “There is something utopian about the possibilities revealed by the Tichborne case—for social disruption and reinvention.” | Lit Hub History
- “I knew more about Scottish settler Norman McLeod than I did about my own ancestors, was more comfortable in a kilt than in a korowai.” Shilo Kino on how Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider introduced Māori culture to the world. | Lit Hub Criticism
- B.A. Shapiro on mining the endlessly fascinating lore of art history to write multiple works of fiction. | Lit Hub Craft
- Read “Reading,” a poem by Emily Skillings from the collection Tantrums in Air: “ It was as if without these markings / she couldn’t understand what was written.” | Lit Hub Poetry
- “The sun was half bright, half warm, half full.” Read from An Yu’s new novel, Sunbirth. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Jon Allsop looks into the potential for corruption inherent in Presidential libraries. | The New Yorker
- “Hans Christian Andersen possessed a certain genius — not merely in the fecundity of his lurid imaginings, but in his talent for identifying a child’s primal terrors.” Sadie Stein’s love-hate relationship with the writer of “The Little Match Girl.” | The New York Times
- Harrison Stetler looks at Bertolt Brecht’s anti-war sentiments through a new production of Mother Courage and Her Children. | Jacobin
- Betsy Golden Kellem explores the bizarre history of the Automaton Chess Player. | JSTOR Daily
- Jack Skelley and Philippa Snow discuss writing two books at once, a love/hate relationship with pop culture, and more. | Interview
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