Lit Hub Daily: July 31, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1703, Daniel Defoe is sentenced to humiliation in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel after publishing a politically satirical pamphlet. According to legend, the crowd pelts him with flowers.
- July’s best book covers center stretched, blurred, and otherwise distorted images. | Lit Hub Design
- Books by Jamaica Kincaid, Samanta Schwebelin, Eimear McBride and more are arriving in paperback this month! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, Rachel Aviv’s You Won’t Get Free of It, Sigrid Nunez’s It Will Come Back to You, and David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light all feature among July’s best reviewed books. | Book Marks
- From debuts to modern classics, these are the pieces of literary film and TV you need to stream in August. | Lit Hub Film
- “The Little Prince will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam.” Read the first reviews of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s most famous work (on the 82nd anniversary of his disappearance). | Book Marks
- “Dodging cars that didn’t even attempt to slow down, I made my way across the four-lane highway, along which Pig-licker and I had been running, coughing, and about to die in all kinds of ways.” Read from Will Cathcart’s new novel, This is How People Die. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Joshua M. Greenberg looks back on the lost culture and camaraderie of video rental stores. | The MIT Press Reader
- “I hope this doesn’t seem insensitive: the book is autistic. It’s really just a study of someone with level-one autism trying to tell a story.” Steve Rose profiles Michael Thomas. | The Guardian
- College newspaper censorship is increasing across American universities, but student journalists aren’t backing down. | The Nation
- People keep gifting personalized AI-generated children’s books (and kids don’t even like them). | Wired
- Why do humans love books with animal narrators? “Every novel requires some suspension of disbelief, but a book narrated by an animal—a surprisingly common subgenre—raises unique questions about representation.” | The Atlantic
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