Lit Hub Daily: July 16, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY:cIn 1951, The Catcher in the Rye is published by Little Brown and Company.
- “Perhaps every sixteen-year-old boy needs a smart sister like Phoebe Caulfield.” Why Phoebe’s the real icon in The Catcher in the Rye. | Lit Hub Criticism
- How Israel turned Gaza into an “annihilation zone” by leveling the land. | Lit Hub History
- Clare Cavanagh considers how the poetry of Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska teaches us that “trivia matters. Frivolity counts. The ordinary is anything but.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction. | Lit Hub Bookstores
- “A young man possessed of a young man’s vigor and callowness, and an old man’s jaundiced eye rip-snorts his way through this raucous novel.” Read the earliest reviews of The Catcher in the Rye. | Book Marks
- Work by Laura Vazquez, Eduardo Halfon, Ian Bostridge, and more writers is on Mark Haber’s TBR. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Catcher in the Rye at 75 offers something of a guide away from the manosphere and its bluster.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- “The inhabitants of Cheniere Disparue had a reputation for sloppy living.” Read from Stephanie Soileau’s new novel, Should the Waters Take Us. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Is Heated Rivalry the Moby-Dick of Canadian gay hockey shows? | Public Books
- In defense of instrumental pop, a “music with no ulterior motive.” | The Baffler
- “They just heard me explaining that the odds are actually quite good in Russian roulette.” Jacob Russell writes a dispatch from Beirut. | The Paris Review
- Hua Hsu revisits Shiva Naipaul’s newly-reissued 1980 account of Jonestown, Journey to Nowhere, which “interrogates not just good and evil but reverberations through time: the bruising force of personality, a politics scaffolded on the maddest of promises, our tendency to mistake charisma for wisdom.” | The New Yorker
- How chatbots turned a customer service request about a missing delivery into Dante’s journey through Hell. | Wired
- Cristina Dorador writes a love letter to the Atacama Desert amid climate change, translated by Robin Myers. | The Dial
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