Lit Hub Daily: May 21, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1832, Washington Irving returns to the United States after living in Europe for seventeen years.
- Katherine Packert Burke considers eight different attempts at explaining the purpose of trans literature. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Why you shouldn’t feel guilty about the books you haven’t read. | Lit Hub Craft
- On the new podcast Passages: On Morrison Namwali Serpell and Tracy K. Smith Discuss Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “School is where some students learn that mercilessly rejecting others is not only permissible but also necessary, to eliminate competition.” How Donald Trump and his allies are remodeling American schools with far-right values. | Lit Hub Politics
- What happens when billionaires control the media? Aldous Huxley and Gore Vidal may have some answers. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction. | Lit Hub Bookstores
- Ece Temelkuran remembers exile and authoritarianism: “You become that child again, suddenly locked out, left in the cold, alone with the beasts.” | Lit Hub Memoir
- “A rigorous, self-assured, propulsive, at times terrifying portrait of a dweebocracy that sets the agenda for the planet.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week | Book Marks
- “And he says, ‘You can call me Six,’ in his gristly little batman voice.” Read from Violet Allen’s new novel, Plastic, Prism, Void: Part One. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “[M]y surreal day-to-day, a regular life broken up by suspensions of my rights, stopped mattering.” Abraham Jiménez Enoa on running an independent newspaper in Cuba (tr. Lily Meyer). | The Dial
- Edwidge Danticat talks to Kaitlyn Greenidge about craft, ghosts, and the limits of writing routines. | Harper’s Bazaar
- Theresa Montaño and Oriel María Siu remember how Rudy Acuña reshaped both Chicano studies and history. | The Nation
- The internet discourse targeting R.F. Kuang seems to prove humanity will never escape the shadow of Your Fave is Problematic. | Slate
- Take a look inside the newspapers of the Iranian Revolution. | JSTOR Daily
- Grace Byron considers Katherine Packert Burke’s All Us Saints and the trope of the trans killer. | The Baffler
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