TODAY: In 1969, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Soviet Writers Union.
Lit Hub Daily: November 12, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
- Olivia Laing on channeling the spirits of Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Danilo Donati to write a thriller. | Lit Hub Craft
- How “R&B drumming had been permanently marked” by genre pioneer Clyde Stubblefield. | Lit Hub Music
- James Geary weighs in on the similarities between aphorisms and poetry. | Lit Hub Criticism
- “What glowed at me with such potency that I would willingly immerse myself for all the months of writing slog?” Emma Darwin recalls writing about family (and taking inspiration from 16th century painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder). | Lit Hub History
- Mikhail Zygar chronicles Mikhail Gorbachev’s early rise to power. | Lit Hub Politics
- Stuart Jeffries considers David Graeber’s thoughts on structural stupidity: “If only we were intelligent enough to realize our own stupidity, we might enjoy our lives more. But we aren’t.” | Lit Hub Biography
- “Two lives, two minds, combining. It’s the idea that shaped my writing, and now, in a quieter way, my days.” Grace Walker explains the influence of motherhood on her debut novel. | Lit Hub Craft
- “I am not going to send this. It’s an exercise, it should probably say Dear April at the top because it’s for me.” Read from Quiara Alegria Hudes’s new novel, The White Hot. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “To its users, the web browser was a lovely tool. To its owners, it was a platform—a means of control, a system that locked users in and monitored their behavior.” James Gleick considers new books about the decline of the internet. | New York Review of Books
- Bookstores across the country are setting up food banks to help SNAP recipients. | The New York Times
- “What appeared to be a single extrajudicial killing now looked like a program to eliminate Khalistani activists across North America.” Karan Majahan on the killing of a Canadian Sikh. | Granta
- David Szalay talks to Lisa Allardice about his Booker Prize-winning novel, Flesh. | The Guardian
- Did The Paris Review really begin as CIA propaganda? Peter Matthiessen biographer Lance Richardson elaborates. | The Paris Review
- Daisy Alioto examines uses of the color yellow in the writerly PLUR1BUS. | Dirt
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