Lit Hub Daily: July 31, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1703, Daniel Defoe is sentenced to humiliation in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel after publishing a politically satirical pamphlet. According to legend, the crowd pelts him with flowers.

• July’s best book covers center stretched, blurred, and otherwise distorted images. | Lit Hub Design
• “What if I admitted to myself that my claims on middle class respectability were tenuous at best, and inside me was the scared little girl terrified of losing the roof above her head?” On learning from the “research dead-end” and our own failed poetry. | Lit Hub Craft
• Books by Jamaica Kincaid, Samanta Schwebelin, Eimear McBride and more are arriving in paperback this month! | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, Rachel Aviv’s You Won’t Get Free of It, Sigrid Nunez’s It Will Come Back to You, and David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light all feature among July’s best reviewed books. | Book Marks
• From debuts to  modern classics, these are the pieces of literary film and TV you need to stream in August. | Lit Hub Film
• “The Little Prince will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam.” Read the first reviews of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s most famous work (on the 82nd anniversary of his disappearance). | Book Marks
• “Dodging cars that didn’t even attempt to slow down, I made my way across the four-lane highway, along which Pig-licker and I had been running, coughing, and about to die in all kinds of ways.” Read from Will Cathcart’s new novel, This is How People Die. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Joshua M. Greenberg looks back on the lost culture and camaraderie of video rental stores. | The MIT Press Reader
• “I hope this doesn’t seem insensitive: the book is autistic. It’s really just a study of someone with level-one autism trying to tell a story.” Steve Rose profiles Michael Thomas. | The Guardian
• College newspaper censorship is increasing across American universities, but student journalists aren’t backing down. | The Nation
• People keep gifting personalized AI-generated children’s books (and kids don’t even like them). | Wired
• Why do humans love books with animal narrators? “Every novel requires some suspension of disbelief, but a book narrated by an animal—a surprisingly common subgenre—raises unique questions about representation.” | The Atlantic

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