Lit Hub Daily: January 23, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1789, John Cleland, the English novelist best known as the author of Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, dies.
- “The SGG doesn’t fail because she’s bad at her con, but because her success would require a culture that is willing to let women want openly, take what they want, and keep what they take.” Lior Torenberg explains what sets the Sad Girl Grifter (SGG) apart from her lying, scheming peers. | Lit Hub Criticism
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Julian Barnes’ Departure(s), Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ The Flower Bearers, and Brenda Navarro’s Eating Ashes all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- What’s the first step to finding an agent? Picking up a lot of books. | Lit Hub Craft
- How an enslaved gardener named Antoine made the pecan a cash crop. | Lit Hub History
- Sarah E. Ladd explores the enduring power of Regency-era romance heroines. | Lit Hub Craft
- Read three poems by Molly Ledbetter, from her new collection Air Ball: “Ship time has nothing to do / with real time.” | Lit Hub Poetry
- “I’ve seen the steppe from the window of an airplane. Do you know what it looks like? The steppe looks like a sinewy piece of yellow meat.” Read from Oksana Vasyakina’s novel Steppe, translated by Elina Alter. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “It’s notable that Atwood spends so long dwelling on others’ criticism of her but devotes so little space to a significant relationship with another major writer. Her friendship with Alice Munro is relegated to a single paragraph.” Linda Hall considers the unsaid in Margaret Atwood’s new memoir. | The New Republic
- What reading Wuthering Heights taught Upasna Barath about her parents’ relationship, “a marriage rooted in convenience and material concerns.” | Vogue
- “In their everyday lives, Palestinians create spaces that negate Israeli violence.” Mona El-Ghobashy considers new books by postcolonial studies scholar Haidar Eid and journalist Mohammed Omer Almoghayer. | Public Books
- On doing something you’ve been avoiding (by reading John Cheever’s “The Country Husband”). | The Paris Review
- Colin Warren talks to Graham Granger, the student who was arrested for eating an AI art exhibit as anti-AI performance art. | The Nation
- How the internet’s best guide for spotting AI writing also became the best tool for hiding it. | Ars Technica
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