Lit Hub Daily: May 8, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1899, The Irish Literary Theater in Dublin produced its first play, The Countess Cathleen by William Butler Yeats.
- Irene Zabytko recounts reimagining The Canterbury Tales in post-Soviet Ukraine. | Lit Hub Craft
- What our Google searches reveal about humanity and grief. | Lit Hub Technology
- Think it’s hard to write stories for adults? Try writing stories for children. | Lit Hub Craft
- “Culturally, the word is synonymous with ugly, not just for the ways lesbians defy traditional gender roles in the popular imagination but for their disinclination toward and unavailability to men.” On lesbian identity and the gendered politics of ugliness. | Lit Hub Memoir
- John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do, Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, and Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- Why every writer should have some kind of trick: “They break up logjams. They take away your excuses. They banish boredom and encourage you to be counter-intuitive.” | Lit Hub Craft
- Perdita Finn’s explores how her mother embodied a different kind of fairy tale magic. | Lit Hub Memoir
- “From that moment on she was to be known only as ’60.’ In the days that followed, everything else was stripped from her.” Louise Brangan traces the disappearances of girls in 20th century Ireland. | Lit Hub History
- How Angela Brown found herself (and her novel) at the beach. | Lit Hub Craft
- “They were late to John’s girlfriend’s art show, though apparently his girlfriend didn’t believe in time and claimed she didn’t know what late really meant.” Read from Alexa Yasemin Brahme’s debut novel, Good News. | Lit Hub Fiction
- John Semley revisits Robert Coover’s 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., quite possibly “the Great American Dice-Baseball Novel.” | The Nation
- “Make believe. What a wonderful phrase for the active commitment we make to fiction.” Mac Barnett on a life in children’s books. | Longreads
- Brianna Di Monda examines how Vigdis Hjorth writes about family history: “This is her central knot: no matter how much she writes, the core injury remains unresolvable.” | The Baffler
- What we can learn about liberation from the socialist, anti-Zionist Jewish Bund. | NYRB
- How children’s books in the 1980s introduced (and sometimes simplified) the stories of Vietnamese refugees in America. | JSTOR Daily
- Alex Rosenberg considers the clash between narrative and history. | The MIT Press Reader
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