Lit Hub Daily: August 3, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1964, Flannery O’Connor dies.

• Carly Mattox considers Jennette McCurdy’s Half His Age and reckons with the long literary history of age gap relationships. | Lit Hub Criticism
• What should your kids read this August? Try one of these 10 new children’s books. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Rebecca Morgan Frank recommends new poetry collections by José Felipe Alvergue, Victoria Chang, Anna Journey and more! | Lit Hub Poetry
• This week in literary history, Shakespeare’s Macbeth is (probably) performed for the first time. | Lit Hub History
• August’s best new sci-fi and fantasy books bring sea monster villages, soul traders, and even more adventures. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “Sleep was beginning to finally visit the insomniacs and drunkards of T— in central Manila when a commotion louder than the usual domestic squabbles erupted from the room above Mang Calixto’s bakery.” Read from Glenn Diaz’s new novel, Yñiga. | Lit Hub Fiction
• The company offering printed books to train AI has stopped because they couldn’t take the backlash.  | 404 Media
• What Euripides’s The Bacchae can tell us about Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer. | JSTOR Daily
• How genocide has turned Gaza’s soil deadly. | New York Review of Books
• Joyce Carol Oates, reigning queen of the literary internet, has thrown her hat into the Odyssey discourse ring. | The Cut
• Scott W. Stern looks at the emerging trend of fictional character biographies. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Carson Griffith on Steven Pruitt, wildly prolific Wikipedia editor and therefore “the accidental architect of the internet’s brain.” | The New Yorker

Featured Image: Charles Cameron Macauley, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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