Lit Hub Daily: September 23, 2026

Read More TODAY: In 1909, The Phantom of the Opera is first serialized in Le Gaulois.

• Bilal Urick considers Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G, a “poetic meditation on language and time, the basic structural forces of life, stripped of stability under genocide.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• Laura Kolbe on the poetics of subverting linear time and the derangement of “having an intimate, almost sensual relationship to the clock.” | Lit Hub Craft
• Sasha Dovzhyk recommends essential Ukrainian literature by Lesia Ukrainka, Victoria Amelina, Olena Stiazhkina, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz chronicles the story of the actual first shot fired in the American Civil War. | Lit Hub History
• What Katie Clapham’s overhead as a bookseller from “the worst of all the swears” to wigglers. | Lit Hub Memoir
• What does reading The Elements of Style have in common with painting? “The point is clear, elegant writing, of course, but equally important is to think and write visually.” | Lit Hub Art
• How proportional democracy in Weimar Germany enabled Hitler’s rise to power. | Lit Hub History
• “The American Academy of Pediatrics could not explain why Martin, at seven years old, rolled around on the living room floor flapping his arms and cawing, while Teddy, who was not yet five, waited placidly on the front walk.” Read from Madeline ffitch’s new novel, Avalon, Rise. | Lit Hub Fiction
• “Her life is like her work in at least one respect: it is far more difficult to dismiss once you’ve actually engaged with it.” Casey Cep profiles Barbara Kingsolver. | The New Yorker
• David Grundy remembers J.H. Prynne, whose poetry encompassed political inquiry, unexpected slapstick, and the “intentionally, genuinely weird.” | Poetry
• Benjamin Moser talks to Krithika Varagur about tracing the history of anti-Zionism. | The Paris Review
• Contractors OpenAI hired to train their AI have been fired…for training the AI on AI. | 404 Media
• Brad Bolman on rising tides and when land and sea meet in New Orleans. | Broadcast
• Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo remembers the “lucidity, courage, and a high degree of political literacy” of the late Fredric Jameson. | Public Books