A Birthday, a Flopped Adaptation, and the Weight of the Page
Dashiell Hammett was born on May 27, 1894 – which means the father of hardboiled American crime fiction turns 132 this week, a fact that sits quietly behind everything else happening in literary culture right now. Elsewhere in the reading world today, the question of what film does to fiction is back on the table, specifically through Michael Crichton, whose best novel failed badly when it reached the screen, and whose case is being revisited by Lit Hub Film as a kind of cautionary study in adaptation loss.
Then there is the more intimate matter of debut novels and parental exposure. Mary Berman, in a piece for Lit Hub Craft, describes the experience of showing her first book to her parents as “gut-churning” – a word choice that tells you more about the specific vulnerability of literary debut than any abstract account of creative anxiety could. These two poles – the long-dead master and the newly published first-timer – frame a day’s worth of reading that spans poetry, history, fiction, and a dataset large enough to make your head spin.
When History Refuses to Stay in the Past
Thomas Asbridge writes for Lit Hub Health about medieval doctors and the Black Death, specifically about how religious doctrine shaped – and often distorted – medical responses to plague in the fourteenth century. The practical consequence was that theological explanation competed directly with empirical observation at exactly the moment when the latter mattered most. It is a history of institutional thinking overriding evidence, and it reads with an uncomfortable familiarity.
The World War I material, also running at Lit Hub History, is less subtle about its contemporary resonance. The framing is direct: “the fatal combinations of jingoism, fear, fatalism, and sheer stupidity that set off” the war are not historical curiosities but patterns that repeat. The analysis does not soften that claim or dress it in hedging language. Jennie Durant’s piece on honeybees runs alongside this history section, and its register could not be more different – bees, Durant explains, traveled to America and were eventually transformed from “wild foragers to shift workers, clocking in for bloom season as beekeepers hustled them from farm to farm.” The industrial logic embedded in that sentence is doing a lot of quiet work.
Colin Dickey’s consideration of Gray Barker – the poet of postwar repression and paranoia – appears at Poetry magazine and adds another layer to the historical thread running through today’s offerings. Barker’s work, as Dickey reads it, maps the particular psychological texture of mid-twentieth-century American anxiety. Separately, The MIT Press Reader takes on Alan Dunn, the cartoonist who spent decades satirizing the strangest architectural trends of twentieth-century America. Between Barker’s paranoia and Dunn’s architectural absurdism, there is a surprisingly coherent portrait of what the last century looked like from its cultural edges.
Fiction, Identity, and the Question No One Quite Answers
Two pieces today circle the same problem from different angles. Lit Hub Craft runs a short essay organized around a question that is deceptively hard to answer: “Who am I when no one is paying me to be anything?” The framing connects job loss to art-making, not as therapy or compensation but as a structural condition – losing external definition forces a confrontation with whatever self exists underneath it. Thomas Laprade’s short story “Boring Tree,” excerpted at Lit Hub Fiction from his collection Imagining One, I Took the Other, opens with a line that moves in a similar direction: “I feel like I’m being followed by a woman.” The sentence creates unease not through threat but through ambiguity about who is observing whom.
Xiao Hai’s conversation with Tony Hao at The Baffler covers the literature of Chinese “new workers” – a body of writing largely invisible to Western literary attention. The phrase “new workers” refers to the migrant labor force that built modern Chinese cities, and the literature that has emerged from within that community is, by Hao’s account, a distinct cultural formation rather than a subcategory of mainstream Chinese letters. It is the kind of literary conversation that rarely makes it into English-language coverage.
Poetry That Stays With You, Whether You Want It To
Two poems run today at Lit Hub Poetry, and they occupy very different emotional registers. Maria Nazos contributes “Expatriate’s Pantoum” from her collection Pulse, opening with the lines: “Today, we’ll wake again and drink pineapple juice / spiked with Bacardi, then curl up in a hammock.” The pantoum form – with its repeating lines and slowly shifting meanings – is well-suited to the experience of living slightly outside your own life, and Nazos uses it accordingly.
Lila Matsumoto’s “Your dangerous shoe,” from Talk a Blue Streak, operates on a smaller domestic scale and is stranger for it. The poem’s central image: a broken shoe taped so tightly with electrical tape by a flatmate named Dorothy that the speaker cannot get her foot inside it to go to work. It is an image of care gone slightly wrong, of help that forecloses the thing it was meant to enable. The poem earns its strangeness without explaining it.
Sheila Liming’s essay at The Yale Review addresses something that neither poem touches but that haunts the day’s reading at its edges: the physical destruction of a university library. Liming’s argument is that digital reading does not replicate what print reading does cognitively – “we know that reading digital texts does not simply replicate the experience of reading print ones” – and yet institutions continue to discard the tools that build comprehension in favor of whatever is more convenient to store or access. A library’s gutting is not just a space problem. It is a decision about what kind of reading a university thinks is worth protecting.
The New Yorker runs a piece on what professors are mourning in the age of AI, and the grief described is specific: “They talk about a sense of loss and of despair, because the one thing that brought them meaning has been erased, or blotted out, by the arrival of A.I.” The phrasing matters – not that AI has changed teaching, but that it has erased the source of meaning inside it. That is a different kind of complaint than efficiency or academic integrity, and it connects Liming’s library piece to something larger about what institutions are quietly deciding reading is for.
The Data Underneath the Stories
The Pudding has published an analysis of 200,000 similes drawn from fiction – a dataset large enough to reveal patterns in how writers reach for comparison, which metaphors get overused, which remain alive. It is the kind of project that quantitative tools make possible and that literary criticism rarely thinks to ask for. Whether the findings change how anyone reads a sentence is an open question, but the scale of the thing – 200,000 instances of a writer saying like or as and meaning it – suggests that the habit of likening is less occasional than we tend to think. Fiction may be built on simile in ways that close reading, by definition, cannot see. The gap between what a novel does and what any adaptation or summary of it can carry is exactly what that number keeps pointing at.
