Lit Hub Daily: February 12, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is exiled from the Soviet Union.
- LETTERS FROM MINNESOTA: Angela Ajayi on the feeling of authoritarian creep • Jennifer Bowen on the distortions of time under an occupation. | Lit Hub Politics
- Aron Solomon exposes the secret to deposing a mad king (courtesy of fiction and the 25th Amendment). | Lit Hub Criticism
- Check out last week’s Independent Press Top 40 bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction, thanks to the American Booksellers Association. | Lit Hub Bookstores
- “To link something together is to acknowledge that disparate parts are from the same source, that there is an undeniable connection between them.” How her experience with endometriosis has shaped Ysabelle Cheung’s fiction. | Lit Hub Craft
- “An instant classic of that svelte form: no longer than a rattlesnake’s body and just as explosive.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Who designs the cover when a cover designer writes a book? Oliver Munday and Chris Brand discuss the process behind Mundy’s story collection, Head Of Household. | Lit Hub Design
- Matthew Zipf considers the mesmerizing immediacy of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s work. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Martin Aitken’s TBR features Claire-Louise Bennet, David Szalay, Helle Helle, and more. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Jeremy Cooper on examining “areas of personal concern irregularly dealt with by other novelists” in fiction and writing between the past and present. | Lit Hub Art
- “Your lifetime is a knife. / You could eat a plum, / peel the darkly sour sun;” Read two poems by Ed Bok Lee for those who have died in the streets of Minneapolis. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “The town of Ashland rises between two rivers, but you’d never know it.” Read from Dan Simon’s debut novel, Ashland. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “The whole-cloth erasure and erosion of Black communities will not be undone quickly or perhaps ever.” Naomi Jackson on the disappearance of the Black mecca of her youth. | Curbed
- Lora Maslenitsyna considers the unrealized cinema of Sergei Eisenstein. | Public Books
- Robert Rubsam examines three recent cases of cinematic spirituality. | The Baffler
- Mitch Therieau digs into the history (and present) of the protest song. | The New Yorker
- On the desperate, poetic horrors of Denis Johnson. | The New Republic
- Christine Jacobson chronicles the literary history carried by women’s invisible labor. | The Public Domain Review
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