Lit Hub Daily: May 19, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1897, Oscar Wilde is released from Reading Gaol after doing two years of hard labor following being convicted of “homosexual offences.”
- “I never imagined reading books and turning them into movies was a job.” It is, and if you can read a book every two days (and write a book report about it), it could be yours… | Lit Hub
- “It turned her overnight into a symbol—a heroic outlaw to some, an un-American terrorist to many more.” Zayd Ayers Dohrn remembers growing up with a mom on the FBI’s most wanted list. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “If a Black cop—a homosexual, no less—had to shoot and kill a Black man, well, Black men must deserve to be killed by cops.” Steven W. Thrasher on copaganda, pinkwashing, and the time he almost became an NYPD cop. | Lit Hub
- Natalie Lemle talks to Nicole Cherubini about sculpture, writing, and “the lifetime of an object.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Djamel White on what it means to teach writing to kids (as someone who dropped out of school). | Lit Hub Memoir
- The 21 new titles out today include books by Paige Lewis, Ali Smith, and Jesmyn Ward! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Robert Isaacs makes meaning from pushing buttons: “Yet even beyond their immediate, material purpose, there’s a compelling beauty to these patterns when I finally discover one—a rhythm, a dance, a complex and deeply satisfying balance.” | Lit Hub Craft
- Heather Eng recommends books that expose social mobility myths by Marisa Kashino, Susie Yang, Danzy Senna, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Ayelet Waldman explores the parallels between quilting and writing. | Lit Hub Craft
- “The world beyond San Voyager? Well, it was dark.” Read from Paige Lewis’s debut novel, Canon. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “What we learn from Kids is that Minnelli lived Garland’s life to the full.” Frances Wilson on Liza Minnelli’s “riveting” new memoir. | NYRB
- Joshua Bennett considers the life and work of poet, attorney, and judge Bruce M. Wright: “There was truly no moment in his adult life, as far as I can tell, when Wright wasn’t trying to shake up the world.” | Poetry
- Jill Lepore chronicles a pre-AI history of automated writing slop. | The New Yorker
- “The attacks on Black studies are not only connected to the tectonic rightward shifts we are experiencing in every terrain of public life in the United States, but fundamental to them.” On the dismantling of Black studies. | The Nation
- Jaroslav Švelch considers videogame creatures and the nuanced morality of monster slaying. | The MIT Press Reader
- Sapphire and Alexis Pauline Gumbs discuss Jayne Cortez’s poetry, art, and activism. | LARB
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