Lit Hub Daily: October 23, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1958, Boris Pasternak is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is forced to renounce it by Soviet authorities.
- “I see film and books as apples and oranges. Both are fruits, but the taste is remarkably different.” Stephen King reflects on the numerous adaptations of his work. | Lit Hub Film
- Publishers Hedi El Kholti and Dan Simon remember their friend Gary Indiana on the anniversary of his death: “I took Horse Crazy home with me and read it over the weekend, and I was amazed. It felt like a major personal discovery.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
- Cundill Prize finalist Lyndal Roper recommends six essential texts on the German Peasants’ War by Friedrich Engels, Peter Blickle, Gerd Schwerhoff and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- “The novel contains many such moments of almost febrile power, rendered in prose both gorgeous and a little unnerving.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
- Imaobong Umoren explains how Christopher Columbus “wreaked havoc” in the Caribbean through enslaving indigenous people. | Lit Hub History
- Things are tough out there (in the publishing world) for writers and editors these days… Maris Kreizman suggests you go easy on yourself. | Lit Hub
- Evan Dando of The Lemonheads recalls how an impromptu Walgreens concert signaled the beginning of his sobriety. | Lit Hub Memoir
- Serhii Plokhy chronicles the race to develop nuclear weapons in Germany, the USSR, and Japan. | Lit Hub History
- “Adrift in an azure trance, affixed by invisible / star-points of pins to the sumptuous nothing of black / velvet, it’s as immense as the word once.” Read “Blue Morpho,” a poem by A Violence author Paula Bohince. | Lit Hub Poetry
- “Thirty-seven, Qing Yuan thought when a cleaner wheeled the corpse of a woman into the morgue. The woman’s husband, a scrawny man in a shabby work uniform, smelling of sewage, drooped behind the gurney.” Read from Ruyan Meng’s novel, The Morgue Keeper. | Lit Hub Fiction
- “We both know how boredom feels. We both know what it means to be cold, out here, wherever we both are or have been.” Harriet Armstrong considers the meanings of lol. | Granta
- Xiaolu Guo on disrupting and reinventing works in the Western canon, and “writing [as] a form of semiotic sabotage.” | Words Without Borders
- Tita Chico examines the radical power of Black global cinema. | Public Books
- What Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar can remind us about the gross mishandling of justice in the present day. | JSTOR Daily
- On the “brute simplicity” of TextEdit, for those who want their word processing without complication. | The New Yorker
- Another reason not to use AI? Turns out, LLMs get brain rot, too. | Wired
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