Lit Hub Daily: January 28, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1960, Zora Neale Hurston dies.
- “Poetry is a testament to the failure of wolves.” An anonymous Midwest poet writes a letter to his daughter about the murder of a poet. | Lit Hub Politics
- How tabloid journalism turned victims into criminals by shaping the racist narrative of the 1984 Bernie Goetz subway shooting. | Lit Hub History
- Thao Thai hosts a roundtable discussion on how folklore holds the weight of cultures in flux. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “I was six years old when I logged on for the first time.” Steven Underwood on participating in Black art and community online. | Lit Hub Technology
- Julian Sancton tells the tale of Roger Dooley and his search for nautical eighteenth-century treasure. | Lit Hub Biography
- “I love Tasmania. I love it with a kind of fierce, unreasonable passion. If you tried to take me from it, I would fight you.” Heather Rose explains how living quietly enhances her writing. | Lit Hub Craft
- Susan Wise Bauer on epilepsy, understanding illness, and ancient diagnoses. | Lit Hub Health
- Mike Pitts chronicles what Europeans encountered on Easter Island/Rapa Nui and the enduring mystery of its famous statues. | Lit Hub History
- “A sole photograph from Beckomberga: I found it in one of Lone’s albums. I have a hat on my head and the old fox-fur boa hanging round my neck.” Read from Sara Stridsberg’s novel Beckomberga, translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Kristen Radtke remembers her childhood best friend Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse murdered by ICE in Minneapolis. | The Verge
- George Monaghan introduces you to Jack Edwards, TikTok’s most influential literary critic. | The New Statesman
- “I have come back to London to lose my bearings, to lose myself, but all I can make out in its depths is my own reflection.” Hari Kunzru drifts through London. | Harper’s
- Adam Morgan talks to George Saunders about death (and other things). | Esquire
- “In a post-Kirkified world, this impulse to bastardize Good’s image after her death emerged immediately on mainstream social media, boosted by influential right-wing influencers, and mutated alongside the rapid spread of misinformation about her.” On the unsettling meme economy in the aftermath of violence. | 404 Media
- Laurie Stone considers love (and the 1981 adaptation of Ten Days That Shook the World, Reds). | The Paris Review
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