Lit Hub Daily: August 18, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1958, Lolita is published in the United States.

• What Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel can teach us about grief, literature, and growing up. | Lit Hub TV
• Florence Hazrat explores the surprisingly controversial history of the parenthesis. | Lit Hub History
• Edwidge Danticat tells us why she wishes her former teachers would read her work and answers more of our questions about literary life. | Lit Hub Craft
• The 20 new books out today include titles by Joby Warrick, LaToya Watkins, Katy Simpson Smith, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Chiang-rae Lee talks to Jane Ciabattari about how his family history and immigrant childhood influence his fiction. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Why Earl Swift hiked the Appalachian Trail the first time (and the second). | Lit Hub Memoir
• “One day they were in love and the next, a manuscript appeared in his study, written in a language she didn’t speak.” Read from Katy Simpson Smith’s new novel, The Maltese Version. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Maria Adelmann reports on the crisis of the eternal adjunct. | The Nation
• “We inhabit a world where the tendencies Hamlet embodied are magnified, and where opportunities for self-commentary are effectively continuous.” Anna Ballan on Freud in the age of therapy-speak. | The Hedgehog Review
• On AI, screenwriters, and the cost of free labor: “Creative workers have always been vulnerable to exploitation. The idea that the early stage of a career must involve “hope work” (unpaid internships, apprenticeships, spec scripts, auditions, free gigs, etc.) is built in, and easily abused.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
• In case you need another reason to dump Amazon, the company is destroying books to train AI. | 404 Media
• Ellie Blackwood on why “Ted Chiang’s stories keep breaking my brain.” | Reactor
• In defense of loving Mary Oliver. | The Atlantic

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