Lit Hub Daily: April 24, 2026

TODAY: In 1947, Willa Cather dies. 

• How early aughts “women’s fiction” helped Sarah Vacchiano survive divorce. | Lit Hub Craft
• Geneen Roth explores the torture of diet culture and power of learning to live in (and love) her body. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “I like art that preserves the rough edges of the person.” Why Brad Neely thinks artists should embrace errors. | Lit Hub Craft
• Sophie Mackintosh’s Permanence, Xochitl Gonzalez’s Last Night in Brooklyn, and Jayne Anne Phillips’ Small Town Girls all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
• Tracy Clark-Flory and Kate Schatz discuss research, reuniting with their siblings, and trying to capture the history of reproductive rights. | Lit Hub In Conversation
• “The lake below was green, opaque, and nestled into a hundred little inlets. No broad watery vista; only hills heaped upon hills.” A short history of our drowned towns. | Lit Hub Craft
• Continuing our series for National Poetry Month, we recommended reading Marie Howe’s “You Think This Happened Only Once and Long Ago.” | Lit Hub Poetry
• Max Rudin on Library of America and the role of great American writers, from his speech at the 2026 Whiting Awards Ceremony. | Lit Hub Craft
• “I was born thirty-five years ago in a place called Mazinagar. My family lived on a narrow street, not far from the town square.” Read from Dur e Aziz Amna’s new novel, A Splintering. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Justin Neuman makes the case for engaging deeply with the reality of AI, and making distinctions between its uses. | The Hedgehog Review
• “The only divinity a novel can really accommodate is its author, and the closest thing to faith a novelist can convincingly evoke is doubt.” Max Norman considers Knausgaard’s Faustian bargain. | The Drift
• “Even some pro-A.I. education advocates concede that A.I. poses significant cognitive and social-emotional risks to young people.” The case for keeping AI out of schools. | The New Yorker
• On Seamus Heaney’s “deeply felt sense of obligation to the work of being a poet.” | NYRB
• Why Alyssa Collins initially hesitated when asked to write an introduction to Octavia Butler’s Survivor. | Los Angeles Times