Lit Hub Daily: February 17, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1836, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer is born.
- LETTERS FROM MINNESOTA: Kara Olson on the struggle to make meaning from chaos • Gabriela Spears-Rico on the all-too-familiar brutality of ICE. | Lit Hub Politics
- Ali Abu-Zayed recounts his experiences and those of others enduring starvation, displacement and genocide in Gaza. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Sheila Heti on why Torborg Nedreaas’s Nothing Grows by Moonlight is a conventional story told in an unconventional way. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Sergio Luzzatto on The Marquis de Morès, the father of European fascism: “Morès thus was the first to try to handle the peculiar mixture of racial hatred, alleged interclass solidarity, and organized paramilitary violence to which Benito Mussolini would give the name fascism.” | Lit Hub Biography
- Rashad Shabazz on the mid-twentieth century Black music scene in Minneapolis that gave birth to Prince’s sound. | Lit Hub Music
- The 21 new books out today include titles by Gisèle Pelicot, Namwali Serpell, Jon Meacham, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- D.S. Waldman considers his own poetic voice alongside those of mentors and peers like Louise Glück and Garth Greenwell. | Lit Hub Craft
- “I would say that reading Morrison over the course of my life as a fiction writer has given me the courage of my artistic convictions.” Jane Ciabattari talks to Namwali Serpell about engaging with Toni Morrison as both a reader and a critic. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Lillian Li recommends books about friendship by Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Ames, Kim Fu, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “This story doesn’t have a beginning.” Read from Jess Shannon’s new novel, Cleaner. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “Nobody could have convinced me that this was therapeutic, or anything but maybe the stupidest drug in existence.” Sheila Heti chronicles her experiences of psychedelic-assisted therapy. | Granta
- Allegra Goodman considers her mother’s style: “Great women didn’t need fairy tales or magic transformations. On the contrary, women like my mother fashioned themselves—and I could do that too.” | Vogue
- Joshua Rothman wants to know if writers really need rooms of their own. | The New Yorker
- Gaby Del Valle tracks ICE’s movement into suburbs of the Twin Cities. | The Verge
- Annie Lloyd looks back on Halt and Catch Fire as a time capsule of techno-optimism. | Dirt
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