Lit Hub Daily: June 18, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1908, Mark Twain moves to Stormfield, his house in Redding, Connecticut.
- Michelle Tea shares her favorite queer books and why “I feed on queer literature.” | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Ira Wells on the emergence of a modern book censorship movement in Pensacola, Florida: “Many board positions were not hotly contested, and almost anyone could show up at a school board meeting and command their five minutes of airtime.” | Lit Hub Politics
- Hazel Gaynor explores America’s enduring obsession with The Wizard of Oz across literature, film, and more. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “The memory of these fragments is always created, as a matter of reconstruction. And creation is always hope.” Joanna Walsh on the expansive possibilities of the short story. | Lit Hub Craft
- “All season I begged to be taken on a fire.” Kelly Ramsey recalls her early days with the US Forest Service. | Lit Hub Climate Change
- How did a fraudulent carpet dupe the art world for decades? On tracing the history of real and fake antique textiles. | Lit Hub History
- Donna Seaman recommends seven books you need to read (about reading). | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Robert Finch remembers the challenging yet rewarding days spent during one summer in rural Newfoundland. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “It was the most expensive boarding school in the world, the place where American rock stars and Middle Eastern sheikhs and Russian oligarchs sent their children to polish themselves with a European gloss.” Read from Heather Clark’s new novel, The Scrapbook. | Lit Hub Fiction
- And on top of everything else, the semicolon is in decline. | Smithsonian Magazine
- “Offense has become so large and so accepted a part of our response to art that it can sometimes seem we’ve endowed it with unimpeachable authority.” Garth Greenwell on reading through bad feelings. | The Yale Review
- “For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic.” Joshua Rothman on what reading has become in the age of AI. | The New Yorker
- AI scraping bots have been knocking library collections offline. | 404 Media
- Dana A. Williams recalls talking to Toni Morrison about her time as an editor. | Slate
- Jon Repetti on Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book and why “invention and reality cannot be divided on a Venn diagram.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
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