Lit Hub Daily: June 10, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy sets off on a pilgrimage to a monastery disguised as a peasant.

• Helen Bain follows in Sylvia Plath’s footsteps from Paris to Wellesley.| Lit Hub Biography
• Sofia Montrone on becoming reacquainted with her grandfather through fiction: “Before I was a writer with characters of my own, I was imagining Ben.” | Lit Hub Craft
• Brodie Crellin recommends six books with (actually) realistic sex by Robert Gluck, Nicholson Baker, Sheila Heti and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Chera Hammons considers the parallels between how humans treat each other and the natural world.​| Lit Hub Memoir
• On “The Seneca Bear Hunter” Jim Jacobs, who killed the last Eastern Elk in America. | Lit Hub History
• Why art depicting dogs says more about people than it does about them. | Lit Hub Art
• Why just kill your darlings when you can murder them? | Lit Hub Craft
• ​Tobias Carroll on Carlos Labbé’s The Murmuration, possibly the strangest soccer novel ever written.​| Lit Hub Criticism
• “One night in November 2021, I lost my sense of taste and smell. There was a woman sleeping in my bed. I licked her shoulder, buried my nose in her neck.” Read from Leila Slimani’s novel I’ll Take the Fire, translated by Sam Taylor. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “When we focus solely on a writer’s use of stereotypes, and overlook the formal choices she makes in how she uses them, we neglect the ways that literature can play with and in fact subvert stereotypes.” Namwali Serpell offers a new reading of race in Toni Morrison’s novels. | The Yale Review
• Sloane Crosley digs into the agony of misophonia. | The New Yorker
• Ria Banerjee examines the “Woolfian” aspects of Chantal Ackerman’s films. | Public Books
• Morgan Leigh Davies on what COVID novels have gotten wrong. | Current Affairs
• What the 2024 Columbia student protests have in common with Madison Square Garden’s security theater: “What started as an extravagant use of force became a normal part of student life.” | Defector
• Does anyone know what’s going on with Heavy Metal? | The Comics Journal

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