Lit Hub Daily: February 20, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1895, Frederick Douglass dies.
- LETTERS FROM MINNESOTA: Peter Pearson remembers the last day of Alex Pretti’s life • Zeke Caligiuri on coming home, and finding pride in his city | Lit Hub Politics
- On hope and hardship in Gaza amid visiting a destroyed university. | Lit Hub Politics
- “Beloved reflects a deep ambivalence about revelation, specifically about the use of language to reveal.” Namwali Serpell examines Toni Morrison’s uses of ambiguity. | Lit Hub Craft
- Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison, Mohammed Hanif’s Rebel English Academy, and Mark Haddon’s Leaving Home all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- Burnside Soleil on living with his characters and finding his narrator. | Lit Hub Criticism
- What could life on Mars do to the human body? “As is true anywhere, human reproduction in the cosmos will depend on more than just the act of sexual intercourse.” | Lit Hub Science
- Read “A Mother Sends Her Son Off on the Eve of the Bois Caïman Ceremony,” a poem by Sony Ton-Aime from the collection Konbit. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “On the night of the hanging, everything is as calm and orderly as it should be in a jail devoted to the safety and care of one very important man.” Read from Mohammed Hanif’s new novel, Rebel English Academy. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Sarah Jones considers the American right’s obsession with the apocalypse. | New York Magazine
- “For after everything we know about revolutionary terror, why do these books still stir with the romance of revolution?” Jack Jacobs on the urge to view revolutions through rose-colored glasses. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- On doubleness, ambiguity, and perverse humor in Konstantin Vaginov’s Soviet poetry and fiction. | New York Review of Books
- “Is their way of securing our future what I’m meant to honor now, as deportation lists circulate again and citizens are recruited to carry them out?” Masha Hamilton recounts a family history of forgotten deportation and the cost of belonging. | Longreads
- Daisy Alioto considers the appeal of corporate thrillers. | Dirt
- Emanuel Maiberg reports on the horrors of Alpha School, the “AI-powered private school” whose proponents think educational content is obsolete. | 404 Media
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