Lit Hub Daily: May 15, 2026

TODAY: In 1886, Emily Dickinson dies at age 55, with fewer than a dozen of her 1,800 poems published. 

• Max Pearl gets to know Stacey Levine, author of the “deeply weird” small press Pulitzer Prize finalist, Mice 1961. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Adrian McKinty reads Dan Simmons’s take on The Canterbury Tales, “a book for shy sci-fi nerds who are unable to talk to strangers on trains.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• Lucy Ives offers prompts to help you write something you can’t measure. | Lit Hub Craft
• Cassidy Gard explains why she can’t just take it easy: “I think for a long time I tried to water down the parts of myself to be more like that, but it made my chest feel hot and claustrophobic.” | Lit Hub Memoir
• Why investment banks are to blame for the rise of the yuppie. | Lit Hub Politics
• Vanessa Hua’s Coyoteland, Isaac Fitzgerald’s American Rambler, and Christina Baker Kline’s The Foursome all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
• Ailsa Ross recommends books for insomniacs by Byung-chul Han, Annabel Abbs-streets, Samantha Harvey, and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• Tamiko Nimura recalls how family history and personal experience intersected while writing her memoir. | Lit Hub Craft
• “In remodeling my writing practice, I also remodeled who I was, who I could be, as a writer.” How chronic illness changed Chet’la Sebree’s literary life. | Lit Hub Health
• “He cooked and we ate our entire dinner including dessert out of one cast-iron frying pan, scooping up the last of the chocolate ice cream embedded with bits of grilled onion and potato.” Read from Hillary Behrman’s debut collection, Lake Effect. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Why chatbot-composed verse still has the “tics of contemporary mediocre poetry.” | The Nation
• Lindsey Adler profiles Amy Wallace, David Foster Wallace’s sister: “Scrutiny around David’s upbringing is inevitably scrutiny of her own upbringing, though hardly any of those critics care to understand her experience—or even know she exists.” | The Small Bow
• Kyle Chayka digs into the recent proliferation of community newsletters. | The New Yorker
• How Disneyland’s hyperreal animatronics signaled the bleak onset of modern automation: “Not even our vices, in the world that Disney made, are truly ours.” | The Baffler
• The children’s lit side of the internet is experiencing some drama. | Slate