Lit Hub Daily: November 6, 2026

TODAY: In 1884, Williams Wells Brown dies.

• Katherine Kelaidis on Sergey Davydov and why stories of ordinary life are essential in times of political upheaval: “Hatred and division, the business of political conflict, are not the organizing principles of his inner world. Love is.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• Why Adam Peterson thinks sci-fi needs more sex. | Lit Hub Craft
• “I feel solace in working with pencil and paper.” Priyanka Kumar on the process of illustrating her own nature writing. | Lit Hub Art
• Judi Dench’s Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, Ian Rankin’s The Heights, Louise Kennedy’s Stations, and Simon Garfield’s The Pen: A Human History all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
• How advances in neuroscience can give paralyzed people a voice. | Lit Hub Science
• “When a sparrow scratches at the horizon / Do I search for an idol?” Read “Arabic Music,” a poem by Mahmoud Darwish from Darwish: Poems. | Lit Hub Poetry
• “This is Ada noticing on her tongue the translucence of the word escriure and the word novel·la, to write and novel, respectively.” Read from Irene Solà’s novel Dams, translated by Mara Faye Lethem. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Philippe Jaenada, the winner of this year’s Prix Goncourt, admitted to using ChatGPT “three times” while writing his novel. | The Guardian
• Sophia Nguyen considers the middle-grade protagonist gender gap. | The Atlantic
• Casey McQuiston, author of popular romance novel Red, White, and Royal Blue (which includes a plot about flipping Texas), on the real-life flipping of Texas. | Slate
• No one cares about your time capsule, and that’s okay. | Longreads
• On Kyoko Okazaki’s Helter Skelter, The Substance, and women in body horror. | The Comics Journal
• How UFOs became the domain of the far right: “People who had grown up certain the CIA wasn’t to be trusted were suddenly retweeting former intelligence officials and lighting candles for the FBI.” | Los Angeles Review of Books