Lit Hub Daily: May 13, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1915, Edith Wharton writes in her diary about witnessing World War I in France.
- “Primo Levi didn’t know why he deserved to survive: why him, rather than someone else?” On Primo Levi’s translation of Kafka after Auschwitz. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Lucy Sante recommends books about memory by Frances A. Yates, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Westlake, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Is bartering a better system? On the relationship between money and things. | Lit Hub Politics
- Librarians and archivists didn’t steal the Declaration of Independence, but they definitely fought over it. | Lit Hub History
- How to separate truth from illusion while writing the biography of modern astrology’s mother. | Lit Hub Craft
- The lessons we need to learn about climate change from the Pacific Palisades fires. | Lit Hub Climate Change
- Masud Husain explains why dopamine doesn’t do what you think it does. | Lit Hub Science
- John Adams and Thomas Jefferson made unlikely friends (and also changed history). | Lit Hub History
- “…Gilbert was not good with pain, and not at all ready to die, here, today, for no just reason he could think of…” Read from Dimitry Elias Léger’s new novel, Death of the Soccer God. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Russian photographer Alexandra Kuzyk has been sentenced to 18 months in a labor camp for publishing gay K-Pop fanfic. | The Cut
- For screenwriters, training AI “is the new waiting tables.” | Wired
- “How does he manage to do this? I think it’s simple: love.” Sheila Heti on Andrés Felipe Solano’s Gloria. | The Paris Review
- Jill Lepore grapples with how to cover the Trump years while writing American history. | The New Yorker
- Ayşegül Savaş remembers finding writing during a moment of aimlessness. | Granta
- Mia Sato breaks down the clipping economy, the latest source of internet slop. | The Verge
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