Lit Hub Daily: August 7, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1887, German novelist and playwright Anna Elisabet Weirauch is born.
- Princess Joy L. Perry sorts myth from fact while telling the story of how colonists legislated the first slaves in America into existence. | Lit Hub History
- “Am I the literary asshole for prioritizing my writing over the travails of my loved ones?” And other questions answered by Kristen Arnett this week. | Lit Hub Advice
- “There is no doubt that if anyone is capable of rebuilding and renewing, it is Los Angeles.” Ella Berman on writing about the City of Angels. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Chloe Caldwell’s TBR features books by Sheila Heti, Yiyun Li, Hala Alyan, and more! | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Dystopian novels are not merely the expression of vivid imaginations, they are often warnings about what’s to come.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- M.G. Sheftall chronicles daily life in Nagasaki before the atomic bomb: “At least if he could help it, no one else’s grandchild was going to die on his watch because of a decision he made—or failed to make in time.” | Lit Hub History
- “All afternoon we watched Elvis’s old films. Elvis as a cowboy, a soldier, a surfer in nothing but his shorts. By the time we reached the news I was a wreck.” Read from Esther Freud’s novel, My Sister and Other Lovers. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Patricia Lockwood writes about The X-Files, her father, and whether or not we “live in a describable time.” | London Review of Books
- Another consequence of AI? America going nuclear. | The Verge
- Why online age verification laws may signal the “real-time destruction of the internet as we know it.” | The New Yorker
- Sasha Abamsky explores the reality of Kafka’s America. | The Nation
- “His work keeps one’s mind on tiptoe. Illusions beget disillusions but also hopes; hopes beget illusions but also clarities.” Yiyun Li on Graham Greene. | The Paris Review
- Tess Pollok and Olivia Kan-Sperling discuss the semiotics of online writing. | Los Angeles Review of Books
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