Can't see this email? Open in your browser

Lit Hub Daily

October 13, 2026

TODAY: In 1958, Paddington Bear makes his first appearance.

We need your help to continue our essential coverage of the literary world. Lit Hub Members get an ad-free reading experience, exclusive newsletters, editors’ recommendations, early book giveaways, and our classic Joan Didion tote. | Support Lit Hub today.

Bringing the New York School to middle school: Why Frank O’Hara is the perfect way to introduce poetry to tweens. | Lit Hub Criticism

Adam Johnson talks to Amitav Ghosh about The Wayfinder, the many ways to tell a single story, and more at The Center for Fiction. | Lit Hub In Conversation

Kawai Strong Washburn, Adam Wilson, Lauren Michele Jackson and other authors take the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub Craft

“To call such televised brutality sick would be to insult the sick. This was something else. This was cruelty made spectacle.” How the genocide in Gaza has changed the whole Middle East. | Lit Hub Politics

The 20 new books out today include titles by Bonnie Garmus, Yiyun Li, Joy Harjo, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

These seven literary ghosts—Bonnie Jo Campbell’s favorites—could be haunting you from the pages right now! | Lit Hub Criticism

Josefine Kals remembers Stephen Dixon: “His work is a beautiful, and urgent, reminder of the poignancy of life’s smallest moments.” | Lit Hub Craft

Bonnie Garmus, author of Peck & Peck, talks to Jane Ciabattari about writing a coming-of-age novel of poets and poetry. | Lit Hub In Conversation

“Belatedly, John’s last words reached Adelaide. He had been dead for a fortnight, buried for ten days.” Read from Yiyun Li’s new novel, Music Against the Night.| Lit Hub Fiction

“EXTRAORDINARY.” –MADISON SMARTT BELL

The first major biography of Cormac McCarthy with exclusive interviews from Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tracey Daugherty. With precision and grace, Daugherty recounts the story of one of America’s greatest novelists, unveiling the man behind the myth.

“It may be easier to reduce a nonfiction book to its takeaways than it is for a novel. But to treat the genre in this way diminishes both its literariness and its political efficacy.” Tajja Isen on the publishing industry’s nonfiction blunders. | The Walrus

All hail New Directions! | The New York Times

Yiyun Li praises the “infinite genius” of Anne Carson. | The Guardian

Media collectives are thriving, but “lesser-known journalists who want to launch their own publications lack the means to capitalize on this formula because they don’t already have avid readers.” | Dissent

Publishing workers discuss the spread of AI use within the industry. | Wired

HUCKLEBERRY JIM
A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY EDITOR'S PICK

Set in 1991, Huckleberry Jim follows two actors—Axel Emerson, a twenty-two-year-old white actor fresh out of conservatory, and Moses Morton, a fifty-five-year-old Black actor with a lifetime of stages behind him—on a children's tour of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As the two-man company performs Twain's text to American children in the year of Anita Hill, Rodney King's arrest, and the height of the culture wars, the road between them becomes a slow reckoning with race, performance, fatherhood, and what it costs to play another man's part.

Pre-Order Now