Lit Hub Daily: July 20, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson encounters a mysterious sea creature in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
- “For years I’ve been trying to obtain Greek citizenship, which, if one of your parents was born in Greece, can be, ostensibly, a straightforward process.” On experiencing your family’s homeland amid grief. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Fiona Sampson explores what makes a literary biography literary. | Lit Hub Craft
- Steven W. Thrasher examines why “making a commitment to curb Israel’s ability to wage war is the new floor necessary to win elections in the United States.” | Lit Hub Politics
- How leprosy was wielded as a bio-weapon against indigenous Hawaiians. | Lit Hub History
- “To be more precise, I felt as if my life had done a kind of record-skip from my late twenties to my mid-thirties.” What our attitudes towards aging reveal about ourselves. | Lit Hub Health
- Today in literary history, O. Henry is released from prison (after maybe not even committing the crime). | Lit Hub History
- Chef Nephi Craig examines the necessity of preserving Native cuisines. | Lit Hub Food
- “I wake up on a Tuesday cloaked in light. The light isn’t simply radiating off me. It is spitting and sparking. It feels like a second skin.” Read “Wild Light,” Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s story from the new issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “The most interesting thing about How Soccer Explains the World is the tension between being a travelogue and an airport book.” Alex Shephard revisits Franklin Foer’s bestselling 2004 book. | The New Republic
- Richard Fallon considers Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland, and the literary canon of lost worlds. | Public Domain Review
- What is the value of standardized testing in the age of AI? | Slate
- Bruce Handy surveys designer and illustrator Seymour Chwast’s work for children. | The New York Times
- “But even by poetic standards, Margaret Avison was an odd duck.” On the uphill struggle to publish a poet’s biography. | The Walrus
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