Lit Hub Daily: May 20, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1899, French actress Sarah Bernhardt premieres an adaptation of Shakespeare‘s Hamlet with herself in the title role and in a theater named after here.
- Everyone’s talking about Salome right now, and Leslie Baird has some answers about why. | Lit Hub Politics
- How the critical approaches outlined in George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain can apply to audio narratives, too. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Emily Rapp Black offers pawn shop wisdom about object-based writing. | Lit Hub Craft
- How Daniel J. Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music transformed the field of music cognition. | Lit Hub Science
- Kayla Rae Whitaker on why it’s difficult to cut the ephemera from a novel: “Your creature data is there, inside, powering you through time.” | Lit Hub Craft
- Early in his career, George Washington stumbled into an unpaid (and possibly undeserved) internship. | Lit Hub History
- Rachel Mills recommends sisterly books by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Mary Lyn Bracht, Abigail Bergstrom and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Dr. Saira Hameed explores the power of hormones: “I used to think I was in control of my life. But I don’t believe that any more. Learning about hormones changed everything.” | Lit Hub Health
- “In the realm of carnivals, theirs was a small one.” Read from Tracy Lynne Oliver’s new book, Magician. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Vincent Noce tells the story of the “Madoff of manuscripts,” Gérard Lhéritier. | Financial Times
- Fellas, should a man think(eth)? | The New York Times Magazine
- “Just as the worth of knowledge that enlivens us is endless, the work of acquiring it never ends.” David S. Wallace (re)considers “didactic art.” | The New Yorker
- Read “the thing between the wall and my body,” by incarcerated Egyptian poet Ahmed Douma. | The Baffler
- How did fiction grapple with mechanical intelligence in a world before chatbots? Try looking at the works of L. Frank Baum. | JSTOR Daily
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