Lit Hub Daily: January 22, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1893, Japanese Kabuki dramatist Kawatake Mokuami dies.
- “To somebody, somewhere, this memory is history.” Diamond Forde on memory, mothering, and Maya Angelou. | Lit Hub Craft
- Maris Kreizman thinks you should prepare for publishing to chase the Heated Rivalry phenomenon. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Inside the unsavory cobalt mining operations wreaking brutality in the Congo. | Lit Hub Politics
- Melissa Faliveno on queer horror, transformation, and writing a butch Black Swan. | Lit Hub Craft
- David Mazower recommends eight essential works by Yiddish women writers, including Miriam Karpilove, Chava Rosenfarb, Fradl Shtok and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
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“A reverse Lolita tale that dares you to flinch, squeal and/or chuck your book out the window.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Anne Margaret Castro explains why Heated Rivalry is the perfect adaptation of the romance novel’s conventions. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Read “borrowed image,” a poem By S*an D. Henry-Smith from the collection Paces the Cage: “Talk the stories of night. That fella there was a dense kiss. Associate of / liminals, name another such intimacy.” | Lit Hub Poetry
- “A faint glow on the sweeping horizon announced the autumn sun that was about to rise over the city, cloaked in rippling banks of fog.” Read from Fausta Cialente’s novel A Very Cold Winter, translated by Julia Nelsen. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Chances are, you haven’t read the Chinese sci-fi novel The Morning Star of Lingao, but Afra Wang argues that “the secret to understanding modern China is all right there, contained within its prophetic, often frightening pages.” | Wired
- Robin D. G. Kelley and Deborah Chasman discuss Renee Good’s murder in the context of the broader history of police violence. | Boston Review
- Matthew Schratz revisits Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart: “But also, it’s hard to write about because it’s doing a hard thing—trying to really embody the fractured feeling we have in relation to our history.” | Public Books
- On Niels Fredrik Dahl and Scandinavian “reality literature.” | Asymptote
- “These forms insist that you hold contradictions long enough for connections to emerge organically, insist that you reject instant algorithmic associations, insist that you undertake the much slower work of watching one idea complicate another.” On chronically online politics. | The Baffler
- Pioneering literary agent Georges Borchardt has died at 97. | The New York Times
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