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Lit Hub Daily

August 13, 2025

TODAY: In 1946, H.G. Wells dies.

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“Hunger now governs time. It becomes the unrelenting measure by which each hour is known.” Alaa Alqaisi on life in Gaza through the lens of WB Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” | Lit Hub Criticism

Margaret Grace Myers examines the grim legacy of Ronald Reagan and how the AIDS epidemic laid the foundations for sex ed in America. | Lit Hub Politics

Tobias Wolff on Adrienne Salinger’s iconic portraits of Teenagers in Their Bedrooms: “The humanity of these young faces implies a depth of feeling and experience that their histories confirm.” | Lit Hub Photography

Tim Queeney explores ropemaking, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Mocha Dick, the real-life inspiration behind Herman Melville’s iconic white whale. | Lit Hub History

“How are free people supposed to stay free? One short answer: don’t trust anyone over thirty.” On Thomas Paine’s guide to fighting dictatorship. | Lit Hub Politics

Jane Ciabattari talks to Jessica Francis Kane about exploring the life of Penelope Fitzgerald through fiction. | Lit Hub In Conversation

Sam Wachman on the challenges of writing a novel about the war in Ukraine and literature as “a force for peace and solidarity.” | Lit Hub Craft

“What had gone wrong with me didn’t start out with the car. It didn’t end with the car, but the car played a serious part.” Read from C. Mallon’s new novel, Dogs. | Lit Hub Fiction

THE CRUCIBLE MEETS THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny. But when the villagers start to hear barking, and one claims to see the Mansfield sisters transform before his very eyes, the allegations spark fascination and fear like nothing has before. Read Xenobe Purvis’s The Hounding.

On the existential horrors of storytelling through AI companionship. | Wired

“The scenes of prison break from Khiam to Sednaya offer us a glimpse into a possible, yet precarious freedom.” The trajectory of prison liberation and abolition across the Middle East. | The Baffler

Riley MacLeod plays Tiny Bookshop, a bookstore management simulation game. | Aftermath

“After the disastrous meeting, he began asking around about where an original golden ticket from the 1971 Willy Wonka movie, a highly valuable collector’s item, could be pawned.” What do crypto bros have to do with Ronald Dahl? It’s a (really) wild story. | New York Magazine

Take a look at some of Mary Ruefle’s erasure texts, which she’s been making “almost daily” since 1998. | The Paris Review

SHEARING FELLOWSHIP IN LAS VEGAS

Black Mountain Institute's Shearing Fellowship is a nine-month working fellowship for emerging and distinguished writers who have published at least one book with a trade or literary press. Free to apply through September 30. Click to learn more.

Learn More