Lit Hub Daily: June 16, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: 1816, At the Villa Diodati, Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, then challenges each guest to write a ghost story, culminating in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein, John Polidori writing the short story “The Vampyre,” and Byron writing the poem “Darkness.”

• Sophie Lewis examines the phenomenon of heterofatalism. | Lit Hub Politics
• If you want a job as an astronaut, you need to nail the interview. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Erin Maglaque contextualizes her own experience of giving birth through the history of midwifery. | Lit Hub History
• “The most wonderful thing about attending someone else’s wedding is that it’s not my own.” On finding inspiration in someone else’s nuptials. | Lit Hub Craft
• The 20 new books out today include titles by Amitav Ghosh, Joyce Carol Oates, Isabel Waidner, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• How a family’s history of struggle and survival in Jamaica reveals centuries of Black exclusion in healthcare. | Lit Hub Health
• Lynda Schuster chronicles anti-apartheid resistance in 1970s South Africa. | Lit Hub History
• Greg Sarris, author of The Last Human Bear, talks to Jane Ciabattari about telling the stories of California’s indigenous communities. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• “Picture this: an imposing, three-storey mansion on Calcutta’s tree-lined upscale Southern Avenue.” Read from Amitav Ghosh’s new novel, Ghost-Eye. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “Time restarted, at least for Pym’s career as novelist, literally overnight.” On Barbara Pym’s The Sweet Dove Died. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Amy Goodman talks to John Nichols about the purpose of journalism and threats to freedom of the press. | The Nation
• “The whole lesbian world was around poets.” Lakshmi Rivera Amin interviews Sarah Schulman. | Hyperallergic
• A literary and philosophical look at being a garbage collector. | Harper’s
• Laura Seymour searches for signs of neurodivergence in early modern literature. | The Conversation

Article continues after advertisement