Lit Hub Daily: July 21, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1930, Brazilian poet, playwright, and novelist Hilda Hilst is born.

• Why more retellings of the Odyssey should center women: “We are like Penelope, unraveling Homer’s tale for our own purposes.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• How Jean-Paul Sartre and other French intellectuals came to embrace Marxism, to the horror of some of their peers. | Lit Hub History
• If you need to kick-start your writing, maybe you should try reading a little romance. | Lit Hub Craft
• The 20 new books out today include titles by Colson Whitehead, Michael Cunningham, Claire Vaye Watkins, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Yellow Pine, tells Jane Ciabattari about writing the Mojave Desert. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• “Before the first Molotov cocktail reached us, before the crowd with knives and machetes and wooden clubs arrived, it was a large rock that invaded our lunch table.” Read from Aruni Kashyap’s new novel, How to Date a Fanatic. | Lit Hub Fiction
• A fresh coat of paint for The Odyssey: MJ Franklin considers the marketing of a 3,000-year-old epic. | The New York Times
• “Asimov provided us with no keys for encountering machines because the encounter is not a problem we cleanly inhabit and then just as cleanly delete.” Nina Beguš and Nicole Oliva on Asimov and AI. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Finn Brunton traces the history behind one of the internet’s most notorious scams: “They turn the very fact of Nigeria’s history of exploitation by Western interests into a resource that can itself be exploited.” | The MIT Press Reader
• Ed Simon explores Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, often considered the first American Gothic novel. | The Paris Review
• Why backlash to AI is essential for our future. | The Verge
• Sarah Thankam Mathews hangs out with New York City’s twenty-something luddites. | n+1

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