Lit Hub Daily: May 22, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1855, Victor Hugo dies.
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Everyone is an AI cop now, even if they don’t know it: a past Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner weighs in on the recent scandal. | Lit Hub Criticism
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Does Xi Jinping really think China is Athens and the US is Sparta? And is Trump getting any of this? | Lit Hub Politics
- What’s a book x-ray? Manil Suri offers advice for visualizing the narrative structure of your novel. | Lit Hub Craft
- Maybe the truth really is out there. Dr. Sarah Alam Malik considers life beyond planet Earth. | Lit Hub Science
- The racial (and musical) motivations behind America’s first war on drugs: “Laws criminalizing the entire range of recreational drugs were a powerful weapon with which hostile law enforcement could target Black people in general and Black jazz musicians in particular.” | Lit Hub History
- Rebecca Chace revisits Mary McCarthy’s “scandalous bestseller” (and iconic friendship novel) The Group. | Lit Hub Craft
- May Teng on coming home to Jakarta and leaving for New York. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Ali Smith’s Glyph, Ayelet Waldman’s A Perfect Hand, and Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- How Tom Drury’s The End of Vandalism helped Ross McMeekin through a bipolar episode. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “The night their house goes up in flames, April stumbles out the front door with her baby in one arm and a book in the other.” Read from Sarah Damoff’s new novel, The Burning Side. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Foster Kamer talks to 12 creative people about how they use—or, mercifully, don’t use—AI. (Shockingly, James Frey loves it.) | GQ
- “What can liberation possibly mean amid a genocide? After what Israel did to Gaza, which is harder: death or survival?” Nasser Abu Srour on surviving torture in Israel’s prisons (tr. Luke Leafgren). | Equator
- What the Commonwealth Short Story Prize AI scandal reveals about the current state of writing. | The Atlantic
- Reading James Wright’s poem “Lying in a Hammock at A Friend’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” when Pine Island, Minnesota may become home to a massive data center. | The Paris Review
- Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, author of International Booker winner Taiwan Travelogue, and her translator, Lin King, talk to Emma Loffhagen about queerness, Taiwanese literature, and “the inextricability of art and politics”. | The Guardian
- Paula Mejía explores the world of security envelope pattern collectors. | Dirt
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