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Lit Hub Daily

June 23, 2025

TODAY: In 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes receives a patent for the typewriter.

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On the “female realism” of M.F.K. Fisher’s interwar food memoir, The Gastronomical Me. | Lit Hub Criticism

“Transgression doesn’t always equal transcendence and liberty isn’t always found in the libertine.” Ed Simon on why fascism seduces writers. | Lit Hub Politics

Alice Bolin on the late 20th-century despair of Sex and the City: “In the struggle between modernity and tradition, women’s roles and bodies are the concession we make to the past.” | Lit Hub TV

Why Brendan O’Meara’s favorite kind of biography is unauthorized. | Lit Hub Craft

Benjamin Hale remembers his mentor William Melvin Kelley, a Black avant-garde novelist who experimented with language and narrative. | Lit Hub Biography

Diana Arterian talks to Poets.org about Agrippina the Younger, writing historical women, and poetry as liberty. | Lit Hub In Conversation

“Across the hall lived a woman named Helen. Lucy watched her from the hole in the door. She watched strange and beautiful young women coming and going from Helen’s apartment.” Read from Nini Berndt’s novel, There Are Reasons for This. | Lit Hub Fiction

THE LIFE OF CHUCK BY STEPHEN KING

A “phenomenal” (USA TODAY) tale of life and legacy—now a feature film directed by Mike Flanagan, starring Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan—with a new intro by Stephen King and a design surprise.

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“How many worlds can a garment inhabit at one time?” Cori Winrock on Emily Dickinson’s dresses on the moon. | The Paris Review

Tribeca’s Mysterious Bookshop was named the best indie bookstore in the country. | Time Out New York

Anderson Tepper revisits Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, a novel that “played no small part in broadening the possibilities of African literature.” | The New York Times

“I was targeted for writing honestly about what was in front of me—the same thing I’m doing now.” Alistair Kitchen writes about how reporting on the Columbia protests led to his deportation. | The New Yorker

Fleur Hopkins-Loféroni explores a forgotten French sci-fi genre of brain swaps, death rays, and dinosaurs. | Aeon

Erin Evans considers oral history as anti-capitalist storytelling. | Full Stop

A SEXY, DYNAMIC, MYSTICAL ADVENTURE

Gwendolyn Montgomery, New York City's most powerful and glamorous publicist, left her mystical life behind long ago. But now she’s the only one who can protect our world from the realm of the dead.

Available Now

A SPELLBINDING NOVEL OF SUSPENSE

From the author “who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers” (The New York Times Magazine): After the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school, dark secrets surface.

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