Lit Hub Daily: May 18, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1953, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain is published.
- Here are 15 great gifts for the graduating English major in your life. | Lit Hub
- Katherine Kelaidis explains why you should be reading Russian dissident literature. | Lit Hub Criticism
- How ’70’s soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman made unexpectedly subversive daytime television. | Lit Hub TV
- Translator beware: Anton Hur on the myth of the finicky English reader. | Lit Hub Translation
- Caitlin Shetterly recalls the surreal experience of fighting cancer in parallel with the protagonist of her novel. | Lit Hub Craft
- This week in literary history, James Joyce and Marcel Proust meet once (and never again). | Lit Hub History
- Lorraine Boissoneault considers the coming-of-illness narrative as its own kind of bildungsroman. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Todd Smith explores the scrappy perseverance of England’s minor league football teams. | Lit Hub Sports
- Where can the nation-state go from here? “It is clear, in fact, that the decades following 1945 constituted an exceptional period in world history—one that is well and truly at an end.” | Lit Hub History
- “I never liked cleaning my room. At home, I would let dust coat my windows like dryer lint before finally listening to mama and taking a wet paper towel to the glass.” Read from Amanda Rizkalla’s debut novel, Hungered. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Emily Herring considers generational le mal du siècle, from Alfred de Musset and George Sand to the present. | Aeon
- Jonah C. Sirott explores what two recent books, one about Jerry Garcia and the other about the politics of power of professional wrestling, explain about the state of everything, basically. | LARB
- Are we looking at a hot girl(‘s read Steinbeck) summer? | Vulture
- Alex Tan examines the politics of plotlessness through Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork, a novel whose “apparent arc is one of oblivion.” | The Baffler
- As it turns out, AI can’t do anything without human supervision. | The Verge
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