Lit Hub Daily: August 5, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1895, Friedrich Engels dies.
- Maybe you just need a writing date with Rumpelstiltskin. | Lit Hub Craft
- On Etna, The Call of the Wild, and the enduring appear of the canine narrator. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Here are ten great nonfiction titles to read this August, featuring books by Dave Zirin, Claudia Rankine, Kathryn Jezer-Morton, and more. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Margrét Ann Thors on writing for her grandmother and daughter by honoring her Icelandic heritage in her debut novel. | Lit Hub Craft
- “Race, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And Harry’s boyhood travels between Jamaica and New York fed his understanding of both.” How ideas of race and place both influenced Harry Belafonte’s music. | Lit Hub Biography
- “All is recollection save for the slender membrane of now. Every present thought, every present feeling, collides with a league of their familial ghosts.” Read from Fiona Mozley’s new novel, Awake Awake. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “Where once I had viewed Ma as a joyless nag, now I saw not just the Sisyphean rounds of her workload but her relentless desire to inject beauty and normalcy into the family’s chaotic, peripatetic lives.” How Sadie Stein (kinda) came around on Caroline Ingalls. | The New York Times
- Karen Rinaldi, the editor of Kitchen Confidential, attempts to reconcile the public persona of Anthony Bourdain with the Tony she knew. | Air Mail
- What are literary sins? Seven writers share theirs. | The Dial
- Livia Gershon digs into James Baldwin’s complex relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis. | JSTOR Daily
- On Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, the Crow Nation, and the implications of AI. | The Point
- “But the repurposing of a sinister instrument of war into a popcorn container hints at the malleability of the conceit: A Trojan horse contains unexpected multitudes.” Emily Wilson considers the Trojan horse. | The Atlantic
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