Lit Hub Daily: January 20, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1894, Harold Gray, the cartoonist best known as the creator of Little Orphan Annie, is born.
- Love our annual list of the year’s best book covers? Then you’ll go wild over the best book covers of the decade. | Lit Hub Design
- Larissa Pham explores facing your fears in fiction: “Whenever I felt stuck in the writing, I looked to the most unknown corner and asked: What if?” | Lit Hub Craft
- On the arbitrary nature of capital punishment in America and how the criminal justice system decides who gets to live or die. | Lit Hub Politics
- The 24 new titles out today include books by Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, Jennette McCurdy, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “You can be a lot of things and still be you, but there are a lot of things you can’t be without losing yourself. And it matters, in writing, not to lose yourself.” Weighing the question of maintaining an authorial brand. | Lit Hub Craft
- Jane Ziegelman recalls finding a gateway to the old country in Kew Gardens, Queens. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Read “Poem in Which I Should Write About Cain, but I’m Tired Of Writing About Death,” a poem by Diamond Forde from the collection The Book of Alice. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “They went to school; they did school‑kid things, opened their lockers, put books away, took notes…” Read from Gabriel Tallent’s new novel, Crux. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Katy Waldman considers the recent spate of nonfiction about people pleasing. | The New Yorker
- “To monitor one’s tone is human, but why are we this scared of sounding brusque in routine emails?” Nitsuh Abebe on our fear of the period. | The New York Times Magazine
- Isabelle Appleton visits the Lesbian Herstory Archives (and dives into the history of sapphic personal ads). | The Paris Review
- On the past, present, and politics of the crossword. | Defector
- Joshua Bodwell traces the history of Charles Bukowski’s publisher, Black Sparrow Press, and its founder, John Martin. | Los Angeles Review of Books
Article continues after advertisement
