Lit Hub Daily: July 28, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1866, Beatrix Potter is born.

• Why Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s home was a sanctuary for Leon Trotsky until it wasn’t. | Lit Hub Biography
• Look inside Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign with his chief strategist, Tad Devine. | Lit Hub Politics
•  Max Lawton on writing and translating so hard it makes you sick. | Lit Hub On Translation
• Jane Ciabattari gives all of Colson Whitehead’s work (yes, all of it!) a close read. | Lit Hub Criticism
• The 20 new books out today include work by Valeria Luiselli, Emilee Hackney, Annie Jacobsen, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Read W. H. Auden’s classic 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring: “No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy.” | Book Marks
• “If translating a novel felt like putting the drywall on the foundation of a house, writing a novel felt like putting the beams of the foundation up myself.” How translating Korean literature gave Lizzie Buehler the tools to write a novel. | Lit Hub Craft
• “By the time I had been offered the job in London the worst had already happened, and at that moment I found myself at Atocha station.” Read from I Made You Up Inside My Head, Marta Pérez-Carbonell’s debut novel translated by Rosalind Harvey. | Lit Hub Fiction
• A brief history of the bot takeover. | The New Yorker
• “For Wong, a world-historical event such as Tiananmen cannot be written about in just one way. Instead, it must be written about from every angle.” David Grundy on the legacy of poet and activist Nellie Wong. | Poetry
• Donna Harrington-Lueker traces the evolution of the beach read, from the 19th century on. | Zocalo Public Square
• “They do not care much about what a new technology is or how it works; they care about what its adoption would mean for the surrounding community.” The case for an Amish outlook on technology. | The MIT Press Reader
• Odyssey translator Emily Wilson reviews Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. | London Review of Books
• Ismail Muhammad explores how Colson Whitehead’s literary approach to Black history has changed over time. |The New York Times Magazine

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