Lit Hub Daily: October 16, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1758, lexicographer, textbook pioneer, and English-language spelling reformer Noah Webster is born.
- Chris Kraus on researching the the Nagamo Trail Murder and how crime writing acts as an entry to a disconcerted community. | Lit Hub Craft
- “He could not imagine then that I would write in order to find him.” Hester Kaplan looks for her father on Mark Twain’s farm. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Hot take! You definitely don’t need AI to be good at writing. Kristen Arnett weighs in on this and other literary quandaries. | Lit Hub Advice
- Titles by Gabrielle Zevin, Kate Atkinson, Matthew Desmond, and more are on Susan Orlean’s TBR. | Lit Hub Criticism
- Sonya Lea chronicles a notorious case of white supremacist violence in Owensboro, Kentucky: “No one cared that the confessions came without counsel.” | Lit Hub History
- “What makes his writing distinctive is not its sameness but rather its range and variety.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Caleb Klaces on books that blend text with image and the often-overlooked role of photography in fiction. | Lit Hub Art
- “They were desperate. They’d tried in vitro twice. Three adoptions had fallen through.” Read “Babycatcher” from Christian Moody’s story collection, Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Kate Wagner on what happens to the humanities when “many elite universities become less about learning and more like tech incubators with a school attached.” | The Nation
- Earle Havens discusses a rare books collection that celebrates the history of literary forgeries. | JSTOR Daily
- David Trotter on Mrs. Dalloway and what Virginia Woolf owes to Jane Austen. | London Review of Books
- “Art, and speculation more generally, can commandeer the structures of the sensible, even when these are being actively produced to sustain bordering and racialized repression.” Kalindi Vora considers the border as a technology, and art as a disruptive force. | Public Books
- Hilton Als revisits Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy, “a systematic study of existence, values, dread, the universe.” | The Paris Review
- Madeline Leung Coleman asks, “Can you become a Susan Orlean without the conditions that created her?” | Vulture
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