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Lit Hub Daily

October 22, 2025

TODAY: In 1931, true crime author Ann Rule is born.

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What the fascist tech bros get wrong about Prometheus. (And yes, they do want to build a 450-foot statue on Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay). | Lit Hub Politics

Deirdre Sugiuchi goes on set with Julia Scheeres for the adaptation of her groundbreaking memoir, Jesus Land, which unpacks the horrors of the “troubled teen industry.” | Lit Hub Religion

Anna Fiteni examines the influence of Welsh culture on the likes of Fleetwood Mac, Lord of the Rings, Hayao Miyazaki, and so much more. | Lit Hub Criticism

Can a mountain really be cursed? Adrienne Mayor explores the folk mythology behind so much of our natural history. | Lit Hub History

Alexis Wright recounts the time Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth went to the United Nations in Geneva: “When you go to the UN no one is allowed to bring anything political because no state is to be upset or whatever. So we brought it all.” | Lit Hub Memoir

How Ludwig Wittgenstein “came to think of philosophy as a never-ending form of therapy.” | Lit Hub Biography

Akvilė Kavaliauskaitė on both loving the Lithuanian language and being trapped by it. | Lit Hub On Translation

Maddie Ballard considers sewing as a necessity, a hobby, and a way for us to look forward. | Lit Hub Art

Keisha N. Blain chronicles the trailblazing career of Paulette Nardal and the Black women who fought for human rights on a global scale. | Lit Hub History

“It was never about setting out to write a book—the point all along was to write this book.” Amy Gallo Ryan considers monogamous writing. | Lit Hub Craft

“This is something that happened before it all started: My Berkeley friend offered me her ex-fiancé’s old car.” Read from Damion Searls’s new novel, Analog Days. | Lit Hub Fiction

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“I’m surprised to find that, despite my vanguard pieties, I do think of writing as therapy. I think of it as cardiac rehab.” Ben Lerner on open-heart surgery. | New York Review of Books

Meghan Racklin considers Fanny Howe’s pseudonymous romance novels, and their “anticipation of [her] later spiritual seeking.” | The New Republic

Liby Hays shares advice for writing a screenplay via reverse engineering. | The Paris Review

Ilya Gridneff and Helen DeWitt in conversation with Sean Hooks: No opinion about the Zeitgeist, but surely comedy has often been a response to officially sanctioned brutality. | The Baffler

“The novel plucks all its ideas down from the heaven of abstractions and forces them into the human realm, based on the insight that they exist only there, in human beings made of flesh and blood.” Karl Ove Knausgaard revisits The Brothers Karamazov. | The New Yorker

How a cryptic Substack edgelord exerted influence over New York’s most reactionary art and literature scene from across the Atlantic. | The Cut