Lit Hub Daily: June 18, 2026

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1982, Djuna Barnes dies. 

• Through layers of loss and sorrow, Fatemeh Shams remembers Marjane Satrapi: “Marjane reminded me, as her work often does, that in the bleakest times, art, writing, and human connection are radical acts of repair.”| Lit Hub
• Deb Olin Unferth explores the necessity of writing speculative fiction in this time and place. | Lit Hub Craft
• Brad Gooch chronicles the surreal passage of time in suburban America. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “Whether looming in dark gothic tales or permeating what might seem a sunny suburban world, dread stalks the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates.” 5 reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
• Why every novel is a climate change novel: “Like a floral calendar, every novel records what we’re able to imagine of this time of terror and delusion and longing.” | Lit Hub Craft
• This week on the podcast PASSAGES: On Morrison, Namwali Serpell and Angela Flournoy discuss Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. |Lit Hub In Conversation
• Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction. | Lit Hub Bookstores
• Isabel Waidner’s As If, Danielle Allen’s Radical Duke, and Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
• Samuel Moyn proposes care as the solution to ending American gerontocracy. | Lit Hub Politics
• Is your friend the asshole for name-dropping all the cool, famous authors she hangs with? Kristen Arnett answers this question and more. | Lit Hub Advice
• “I think there’s some value in the kind of understanding fiction offers, whereby anything is possible.” Understanding an absent father through fiction. | Lit Hub Memoir
• If you want to write a novel in 33 days, try tapping into your unconscious. | Lit Hub Craft
• “The triplet of knocks came from the front door just as Sylvia Upshaw and her two children were putting on their shoes, about to walk over to Mrs. Talbot’s house.” Read from De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s new novel, The Feverent Whites. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “Children are our smallest comrades — they live within our victories and failures.” Hal Schrieve surveys children’s literature from a socialist perspective. | Lux
• Patricia Lockwood wants to know what’s going on with American Catholicism. | London Review of Books
• “Telling somebody you were shorting their stock was a little like telling them their child was ugly. And this was Blackstone, for crying out loud.” The diabolical reality of growth. | The Baffler
• Virginia McGee Richards remembers the enslaved South Carolinians who rowed to freedom along the Lowcountry’s Inner Passage. | The MIT Press Reader
• Cookbook author and Substack darling Julia Turshen has a romance novel on the way​ (and yes, there’s food). | Cultured

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