Lit Hub Daily: February 25, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1830, Victor Hugo‘s play Hernani premieres in Paris, eliciting protests from the audience for its attack on Classicism.
- “Imagine a wealthy Oxbridge don giving their teenager a blank check for their Brontë birthday bash and you might begin to grasp the vision.” Emily Van Duyne reviews Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. | Lit Hub Film
- “Why I don’t regret the ‘pornographic’ scene that got my book banned.” Julia Scheeres on the American right’s unslakable desire to censor things. | Lit Hub Politics
- Josh Ireland chronicles the deadly, power-hungry rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin. | Lit Hub History
- How Pong became a hit for Atari: “One spot. Two paddles. A square ball, net, and score. That’s it.” | Lit Hub Technology
- “Jesse Jackson loved us—sometimes before we loved ourselves.” Steven W. Thrasher on Jackson’s legacy of support for LGBTQ rights and HIV/AIDS prevention. | Lit Hub Politics
- David J. Silverman considers race, religion, and the European myth of indigenous savages. | Lit Hub History
- James Martin recounts a day in his life as a paperboy in 1974. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “Grace forces new considerations, reformulates positionalities, and disrupts familiar modes of thinking.” Báyò Akómoláfé explores the intersection of philosophy and fable. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Sarah Bruni recommends books about radical care at the end of the world by Samanta Schweblin, Brit Bennett, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “Not sure what’s more embarrassing, that at fourteen / I still lusted for stuffed animals or that mum’s target / at the claw machine was way better than mine.” Read “Astro Mischief,” a poem by Preeti Vangani from the collection Fifty Mothers. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “Table Fourteen Seat #1 let his wife do the talking at the host stand.” Read from Rebecca Kauffman’s new novel, The Reservation. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “His office spent the past half year trying to put an independent reporter critical of the New York Times in prison.” On the persecution of Alexa Wilkinson and attacks on journalistic free speech. | Jacobin
- How bookbinders helped the Nazis build databases of people to target. | The New York Times
- Why are so many men reading bell hooks’ All About Love? | Harper’s Bazaar
- James McWilliams considers the life and work of Everette Maddox, poet and New Orleans’ most “most literarily accomplished barfly.” | Poetry
- What does not reading do to your writing? Lincoln Michel dives deep on “TV brain prose.” | Counter Craft
- “Eventually, the academic establishment may have to reckon with the very nature of how it courts and accepts the largesse of benefactors.” Higher education’s chaos in the wake of Epstein. | Wired
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