Lit Hub Daily: November 21, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1694, Voltaire is born.
- Only two match-ups remain before we move on to the final round! Vote in our What Was Literary Twitter? bracket to determine the greatest moment of the literary internet. | Lit Hub
- Melissa Broder revisits the “Christian mysticism, absurdism, existentialism, or the Zen Buddhist conception of present-moment awareness” of Jennifer Dawson‘s forgotten 1961 classic, The Ha-Ha. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Gaby Iori explains the connection between the death of tech idealism and the rise of homelessness in Northern California. | Lit Hub Technology
- Joy Williams’s The Pelican Child, John Edgar Wideman’s Languages of Home, and Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- Matthew Davis explores the contradictory stories behind the meaning of Mount Rushmore. | Lit Hub History
- “Moved outdoors, my novel finds its purpose and momentum.” Benjamin Wood on taking it outside. | Lit Hub Craft
- “On Friday as always I built the damn machine.” Read “The Machine” from Max Delsohn’s new collection, Crawl. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “Are we so viscerally uncomfortable with the force and clarity of a middle-aged woman’s libido that we refuse to conceive of open marriage as potentially liberating for wives?” Jean Garnett on West and Girl and open marriage. | The Paris Review
- Simon Dwihartana spends an evening with the Twi-Hards, twenty years after the publication of Twilight. | Interview
- Wang Ping considers the world-altering potential of translation, which gives “an understanding of the poem as a kernel in which a civilization is embedded, and translation as the key to open that kernel.” | Poetry
- How Terence McKenna developed “an absolutely messianic desire” to expose the world to DMT. | The MIT Press Reader
- What an interaction between Elyse Myers and a reader can teach us about the differences between creating content and making art. | Defector
- “Before knowing the truth about Asperger’s involvement in Nazi eugenics, I thought his story would have been perfect movie material. Turns out Sosaku Kobayashi’s story is the one that actually needed a movie.” On Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window and disability under fascism. | Public Books
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