Lit Hub Daily: May 27, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1894, Dashiell Hammett is born.
- Why Michael Crichton’s best novel flopped when it was adapted to film. | Lit Hub Film
- Mary Berman remembers the “gut-churning” experience of showing her parents her debut novel. | Lit Hub Craft
- Thomas Asbridge considers the influence of religion on how medieval doctors treated the Black Death. | Lit Hub Health
- How “the fatal combinations of jingoism, fear, fatalism, and sheer stupidity that set off” World War I carry over into the present. | Lit Hub History
- “Who am I when no one is paying me to be anything?” How making art and losing a job inform each other. | Lit Hub Craft
- “Today, we’ll wake again and drink pineapple juice / spiked with Bacardi, then curl up in a hammock.”Read “Expatriate’s Pantoum.,” a poem by Maria Nazos from the collection Pulse. | Lit Hub Poetry
- Jennie Durant explains how honey bees came to America: “In a sense, bees went from wild foragers to shift workers, clocking in for bloom season as beekeepers hustled them from farm to farm.” | Lit Hub History
- “When I woke up I discovered that Dorothy’s flatmate had taped up my broken shoe so tightly with electrical tape that I couldn’t get my foot in it to go to work.” Read “Your dangerous shoe.,” a poem by Lila Matsumoto from the collection Talk a Blue Streak. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “I feel like I’m being followed by a woman.” Read the story “Boring Tree,” from Thomas Laprade’s Imagining One, I Took the Other. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “We know that reading digital texts does not simply replicate the experience of reading print ones. Yet we still discount the tools that deepen comprehension in favor of those that are more convenient.” Sheila Liming on the destruction of a university library. | The Yale Review
- Colin Dickey considers Gray Barker’s poetry of postwar repression and paranoia. | Poetry
- How cartoonist Alan Dunn satirized the strangest architectural trends of 20th century America. | The MIT Press Reader
- “They talk about a sense of loss and of despair, because the one thing that brought them meaning has been erased, or blotted out, by the arrival of A.I.” What professors are mourning in the age of AI. | The New Yorker
- Xiao Hai talks to Tony Hao about the literature of Chinese “new workers.” | The Baffler
- This one’s for the data lovers: check out this analysis of 200,000 similes from fiction. | The Pudding
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