Lit Hub Daily: July 22, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1886, Hella Wuolijoki is born.
- Why writing alt text image descriptions is an act of literary translation. | Lit Hub Technology
- April Dávila explores the neuroscience of writer’s block (and what we can do to conquer it). | Lit Hub Craft
- How Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance examined disability and medical racism. | Lit Hub History
- Antonio Romani introduces you to the collaborative traveling booksellers of medieval Italy’s countryside. | Lit Hub History
- “In raptures over Chapman’s Homer, Keats forgets / who discovered the Pacific—not stout Cortez / with eagle eyes but Balboa upon a peak in Darien.” Read “The Romantics,” a poem by Maya C. Popa from the collection If You Love That Lady. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “This life, this sorrow. Both were imagined. It was a time when many things were quickly bought and just as soon forgotten.” Read from Christian Kracht’s novel Air, translated by Daniel Bowles. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “What to do with a still-living creative impulse at life’s end, even when it feels like there’s nothing left to say?” David Schurman Wallace considers Fanny Howe’s posthumous This Poor Book. | Poetry
- Why The Odyssey won its battle against “the chudosphere.” | Jacobin
- AI companies are buying old books to train LLMs (because other sources of data are too full of AI slop). | 404 Media
- Bookseller Ana Bell talks about her brother Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for moving a box of zines: “If you were going to tell me that the contents of the box, the zines, the stickers, the poetry, that’s the crime—then we have a bigger problem here, which is free speech.” | The New Republic
- While America is experiencing a literacy crisis, Jefferson County, Mississippi educators are doing something right. | Wired
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