Lit Hub Daily: October 20, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1854, Arthur Rimbaud is born.
- Was Cormac McCarthy that guy in your MFA? | Lit Hub Craft
- How being a writer helped Emma Smith-Stevens navigate the American health insurance system (and why her experiences expose the cruelty of for-profit medicine). | Lit Hub Health
- We promise: you really don’t need a smartphone. | Lit Hub Technology
- The 20 new books out today include titles by Meghan O’Rourke, Zaina Arafat, Philippa Gregory, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- On the real Edinburgh doctor who served as inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. | Lit Hub History
- Meet the authors shortlisted for the 2026 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Why John Berryman’s Shakespeare lectures “drew a line between that which went before and what was to come next.” | Lit Hub Biography
- On the post-war bookselling boom that helped develop Britain’s modern literary culture. | Lit Hub Bookstores
- “Here the walls are so thick, she said, gesturing vaguely, it would be impossible to hear sounds from a neighbouring room.” Read from Chloe Aridjis’s Booker Prize-longlisted novel, The Shadow of the Object. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “It’s the phones. Of course it’s the phones. Who are we kidding?” Lincoln Michel on the not-so-mysterious decline in reading. | Counter Craft
- Sarah Clegg digs into the surprisingly deep roots of romantasy. | The Guardian
- Nathan Heller profiles James Daunt, executive and bookseller. | The New Yorker
- How journalists—including those at Wired—were fooled by Elizabeth Holmes. | Wired
- Will another musician ever take home the Nobel Prize in Literature? | Vulture
- Arundhati Roy explores AI as capitalism’s final form: “The oligarchs do seem to believe in their extinction narrative – at least enough to have built themselves bunkers at the far ends of the Earth stocked with water, food and ammunition. But extinction is not what they are selling the rest of us.” | Equator
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