Lit Hub Daily: March 3, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1873, U.S. Congress enacts the Comstock Act, making it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” books through the mail.
- From Red Emma’s to Edgar Allan Poe, here’s your literary guide to Baltimore for AWP! | Lit Hub
- Hilton Als considers the influence of class and queerness on James Merrill’s A Different Person. | Lit Hub Criticism
- On iconic actors in the age of generative AI and film critic Melissa Anderson’s The Hunger. | Lit Hub Film
- Trina Moyles explores the women adding their voices to the canon of bear literature. | Lit Hub Criticism
- The 23 new books out today include titles by Rebecca Solnit, Vigdis Hjorth, Terry Tempest Williams, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Colm Tóibín considers the short fiction of Mary Lavin: “She had spent her life describing others and finding strategies to create versions of herself on the page; it was not easy to categorize her.” | Lit Hub Criticism
- “Life was like that, after all; my spirit soars in the moment of its oblivion; then down, down deep into the pillow…” F. Scott Fitzgerald on his fight with insomnia (and a mosquito). | Lit Hub Memoir
- “Who are we as a species if we allow monarch butterflies, a living symbol of metamorphosis, to cease to exist?” Terry Tempest Williams on the plight of the monarch butterfly. | Lit Hub Nature
- “You don’t end with a questioning tone. This is important. You have to end with an ambiguous lilt, the tone of which is impossible to indicate through punctuation on a page.” Read from Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, Night Night Fawn. | Lit Hub Fiction
- There’s who will win the Booker Prize and then there’s who should win the Booker Prize: Ryan Chapman weighs in with his annual deep-dive into the shortlist. | The Sewanee Review
- If you like this newsletter, perhaps you’d be interested in an “eight-hour immersive dining and literary experience”? | Los Angeles Times
- “The challenge is ultimately about resisting those authoritarians who, now empowered by the most advanced articulation of the Machine, aim to crush the merely human for the sake of absolute power and control.” Jay Tolson considers humanism in a post-humanist age. | The Hedgehog Review
- Margaret Talbot wants to know why we aren’t talking about author and sexologist Shere Hite. | The New Yorker
- The radical politics and queer brilliance of George Sand: “Her subversive adoption of the male writer’s uniform – from cigar and top hat to spats and riding coat – is brave and funny. It queers the notion of authority.” | The Guardian
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