Lit Hub Daily: September 2, 2026
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1973, J.R.R. Tolkien dies.
- Former political prisoner Abdelrahman ElGendy tells Samaa Khullar about writing from inside a cell. | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “I’d long noticed the discrepancies between my idealism and my pragmatism—between my desire for a fully accessible world and the realities I saw all around me.” On visiting Helen Keller’s birthplace while deaf. | Lit Hub Memoir
- From Slow Horses to Cruel Intentions, these are the pieces of literary film and TV you need to stream in September. | Lit Hub Film
- There’s nothing wrong with a little writerly competition! Laurie Petrou recommends books about literary rivalries by R.F. Kuang, Meg Wolitzer, Sally Rooney, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Jonathan Cheng on when Billy Graham visited Pyongyang, from his Cundill Prize-Shortlisted Korean Messiah. | Lit Hub History
- Janet L. Jones considers Ann Patchett’s Whistler and unravels what literature gets right (and wrong) about horses. | Lit Hub Criticism
- How Elizabeth Wellington Rollins created “mortal, modern counterparts” to the Three Graces in her debut novel. | Lit Hub Craft
- “Evie eased onto the thin goose‑feather mattress and set her mouth to tell her man that it had been a good day, a good night, but Atlas whispered to her first.” Read from LaToya Watkins’s new novel, The Book of Chuck. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Do booksellers think this is the end of reading? Joel Pinckney investigates. | Defector
- Cameron Manley considers two new books on Putin’s authoritarianism: “In this political order, ideology has ceased to be merely a tool of the state and has become a way of perceiving reality itself.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Why humanity should choose play over gamification. | Aeon
- “There is no reason whatsoever for there to be so many megalomaniacal comic book writers in this world. One is a problem, two is a trend, and friend: there are more than two.” Tegan O’Neil examines the past, present, and future of Vertigo. | The Comics Journal
- Marlon James on loving Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and other things). | Vulture
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