Lit Hub Daily: October 23, 2026

Read More TODAY: In 1897, Jessie Catherine Couvreur dies.

• Want to understand the Anthropocene? Look at what humanity has done with chickens. | Lit Hub Science
• Mohammed Massoud Morsi explores how writing fiction about Palestinian lives allows “stories that would otherwise have disappeared into the chest of time” to live on. | Lit Hub Craft
• Why your writing soundtrack matters: “The factor that seems to unite everyone is a sense of repetition—no matter the style, writers will play the same songs over and over again to reach a kind of creative trance.” | Lit Hub Craft
• Lawrence Wright’s Redemption, Walter Mosley’s Hanging & Burning, Lisa Hanawalt’s I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex, and Blake J. Harris’s Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
• “In the performance at the Gate, she sang not only to her live audience but also to those who would hear the recording in the future.” It’s 1961, and you’re seeing Nina Simone live at the Village Gate. | Lit Hub Music
• Ashley Woo on otherness, the darkness of the past, and drawing inspiration from The House of Seven Gables. | Lit Hub Craft
• “You’ve gone to bed with the baby again, as I step / gingerly through the house, searching for quiet projects / I can take to completion and leave for you like origami.” Read “At the Dinner Table at Night,” a poem by Allen Guy Wilcox from the collection The Red Goose. | Lit Hub Poetry
• “Your older sister, Bess, cracked a joke about the sorry state of your lawn, which is why a few months later you decided to grow something.” Read “A Hill of Beans” from Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s new collection, Marvelous Freaks of Nature!. | Lit Hub Fiction
• What happened to Scientific American? Emmet Fraizer investigates the uncertain future (and messy recent past) of the beloved science publication. | The Nation
• “At every step in the long march to our current state of crushing plutocratic inequality, creativity’s holy name was invoked.” Thomas Frank on the “creativity con” that ate the middle class. | Jacobin
• Izabella Scott traces the literary history of dildos. | The Paris Review
• “Perhaps AI, then, is merely affirming what has always been the case: it’s easy enough to counterfeit writing that looks like writing but very hard to mint precise, memorable sentences.” On what AI exposes about human writing. | The Walrus
• “In several descriptions of these amateur events, including some of his own, Hemingway sounds less like a matador than a rodeo clown.” On Hemingway’s beef with bullfighting author Barnaby Conrad. | The New Yorker
• Adam Fleming Petty surveys Brian Evenson’s “visceral and cerebral” oeuvre. | Defector