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Lit Hub Daily

June 16, 2025

TODAY: In 1816, at the Villa Diodati, Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, then challenges each to write a ghost story, resulting in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, John Polidori’s story “The Vampyre,” and Byron’s poem “Darkness.”

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On the cursed art of fact-checking: Isabel Ruehl reads Austin Kelley’s novel The Fact Checker and considers the elusive line between truth and fabulation. | Lit Hub Criticism

Why John le Carré’s work is more relevant than ever: “He is not an idealist—he knows these men and women are doomed—but an existentialist who dramatizes the necessity of individual struggle.” | Lit Hub Politics

Diana Arterian explores the life and death of Agrippina the Younger, the obsession behind her new poetry collection. | Lit Hub Craft

Phil Melanson on writing queer historical fiction and seeing yourself in the past. | Lit Hub Criticism

When art imitates life: Who was the real woman behind André Breton’s Nadja? | Lit Hub Criticism

Dylin Hardcastle recommends books that capture the expansiveness of queer love by Alana Portero, James Baldwin, Lars Horn, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

“Antiquity was not in good repute everywhere.” How monks preserved classical culture and paved the way for the Renaissance. | Lit Hub History

Why Dante and a collegiate technical writing class inspired Robert P. Baird to embrace the humanities. | Lit Hub Craft

“The sun sinks low as I follow my brother up the deer path from the river.” Read from Evanthia Bromiley’s new novel, Crown. | Lit Hub Fiction

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“The enormity of climate change generates a conceptual boundlessness that can outstrip any single writer’s capacity for inventiveness.” Keith Woodhouse considers the future of climate fiction. | Public Books

(Doctor-writer) Danielle Ofri explores the long tradition of doctor-writers. | The New Yorker

“There’s a tabloid soap opera that Goth’s casting conjures, her real-life entanglements mirroring an Austenian plot tailor-made for TMZ.” On cinematic adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels. | The Paris Review

Jessica Bennett profiles E. Jean Carroll, who wrote a secret book. | The Cut

The apocalyptic relevance of C.F. Ramuz’s Into the Sun after a century. | 3:AM

“What if they make us suffer? What if we make them suffer? Each prospect is horrifying in its own way…” On AI, Martha Wells, and a history of robots in literature and film. | The New Yorker

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