Lit Hub Daily: May 20, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1845, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett meet in person for the first time.
- Adam Roberts looks at some of literature’s most iconic culinary moments from Nora Ephron, Charles Dickens, Bryan Washington, and more! | Lit Hub Criticism
- Why Katherine Mansfield’s final days complicate our conventional understanding of cults. | Lit Hub History
- “A novelist is loyal to many rooms.” Madeleine Thien on Spinoza’s metaphysics and finding the many rooms within ourselves. | Lit Hub Craft
- Books by Alison Bechdel, Yiyun Li, and Richard Bausch are among the 26 new titles out today! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
- Daria Lavelle explores the similarities between experimenting in the kitchen and experimenting on the page. | Lit Hub Food
- Richard Bausch explains why you can never permanently ruin a piece of writing (and answers our other burning questions). | Lit Hub In Conversation
- “I have come to the conclusion that the best way to write historical fiction is to include as little history as I possibly can.” Jesse Browner considers the dangers of explaining too much. | Lit Hub Craft
- “I’m attracted to Javier, but he’s afraid of me ’cause if he’s a strawberry tree that’s almost a bush, I’m a sequoia.” Read from Elisa Levi’s novel That’s All I Know, translated by Christina MacSweeney. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Trump’s order to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services will have disastrous consequences for rural libraries. | Publishers Weekly
- “I mean, if they’re good enough for William Blake, they’re good enough for me.” Patricia Lockwood on fairies. | The New Yorker
- Yiyun Li discusses radical acceptance, finding a vocabulary for extreme pain, and Things in Nature Merely Grow, her memoir about losing both her sons to suicide. | The Guardian
- Aaron Boehmer looks at the visual language of underground and alternative newspapers through the ages. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- “Here, education is no longer a pathway to opportunity; it is a fight for survival.” Four students in Gaza on how they keep studying amid genocide. | The Intercept
- Matt Watkins on why the language of domestic violence matters as the Trump administration attempts to eliminate nonprofits that support survivors. | Slate
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