Lit Hub Daily: May 1, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1923, Joseph Heller is born.
- My mean, rich, hot ex-friend is a mediocre literary darling and I hate it: Am I the literary asshole? | Lit Hub Advice
- Charlotte Beradt on the psychological effects of totalitarianism and how Nazi Germany perfected the art of fear. | Lit Hub History
- Dan Reiter dives into the history of surf literature: “One of the best arguments for the legitimacy of the genre is that surfing has its own idiosyncratic language, a patois, and fully inhabits its own universe.” | Lit Hub Sports
- “If Twain belongs to anyone now, it’s the writers making mischief in the structures he left behind.” 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
- Gerald Early traces the role of baseball in Black communities in Reconstruction-era America. | Lit Hub Sports
- Lauren Haddad sings the praises of Twin Peaks, television’s equivalent of a damn fine cup of coffee. | Lit Hub TV
- “To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world.” Tom Holland examines the legacies of ancient Rome’s most famous emperors. | Lit Hub History
- “Peppa Ryan swiveled around for the third time, looking for something, anything, familiar.” Read from Marcia Butler’s new novel, Dear Virginia, Wait for Me. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Zorimar Rivera Montes meditates on resilience, exhaustion, and Puerto Rican poetics. | Public Books
- Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses family history, otherness, and the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. | Democracy Now!
- Incarcerated journalist John J. Lennon on the real cost of true crime to prisoners. | Vulture
- “What’s undeniable is that 4chan helped form the content ecosystem as we know it.” Kyle Chayka on the life, death, and disastrous legacy of the infamous imageboard. | The New Yorker
- Apparently, parents don’t like reading with their kids? Weird! | The Guardian
- “It is the daily, diaristic churn that gives her unloosed first novel the sense of a fully textured fictional world.” Anne Enright examines the relationship between Helen Garner’s fiction and her diaries. | London Review of Books
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