Faulkner's Nobel, Janet Malcolm's Genius and 20 New Books: Lit Hub Daily

By Daniel Okafor

William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature on this day in 1950. That anniversary anchors Lit Hub's daily digest for November 10, 2026, a roundup that ranges from biography to memoir and back to fiction.

What's on the site today?

Eve Sneider considers the genius of Janet Malcolm, the late journalist and biographer who, in Sneider's words, "was running circles around everyone else." It sits in Lit Hub's Biography section, which suits the subject. Malcolm spent a career dissecting other people's obsessions.

History gets its entry too. A piece on how the telephone changed the world makes the argument that the revolution won't be televised, but it might be telephoned. That's the kind of line you can build an essay around.

Jane Ciabattari interviews Karen Olsson, author of the novel Dear Thorns, about her fiction and the endangered species of South Texas. The conversation pairs a craft discussion with an environmental one.

Ted Scheinman, self-described as "a grateful zapee," recommends ten books on electroconvulsive therapy. His list includes work by Sylvia Plath, Robert Pirsig and Donald Antrim.

Lit Hub also launches round two of its bracket to determine the best literary TV adaptation of all time. Readers vote; a champion of literary television gets crowned. Democracy, of a sort.

What are people saying?

The memoir desk asks a plain question — why do we sing? — and answers it with a flourish: "Music still contains the purest thrill: its intensity and intentionality, its rhythm and disruptions, its ability to surprise, to shock."

Fiction readers get an excerpt from Chinelo Okparanta's new novel, This Impossible Life. It opens with a Lagos image: "On the outskirts of the 3rd Mainland Bridge, the old lady dropped Alohan off."

The daily books column lists 20 new titles out today, including work by Annie Proulx, Dustin Hoffman and Rachel Maddow. A busy Tuesday for publishers.

Tahmima Anam, Nick Paumgarten, Gabriel Bump and other authors with recent books take the Lit Hub questionnaire — five authors, seven questions, no wrong answers.

What's worth reading elsewhere?

The digest also points outward:

• At The New Yorker, Merritt Tierce writes on desire and the calculus of modern dating: "I grasped about my interior for whatever dark magic makes a plain woman irresistible to people for other reasons, but I didn't have it."
• At Granta, Peter Trachtenberg reports on conditions in the ER, among what he calls the "difficult patients."
• At Defector, Sloan Murphy discusses her collection Shut Up, I Love You, I'll Call You Tomorrow and being drunk in Chicago — she's called "the bard of Chicago's drunk trans women."
• The Los Angeles Review of Books asks what two new histories of science and philosophy, touching on Lamarck, Aristotle, Jessica Riskin and Melanie Challenger, teach us about the agency of living beings.
• Public Books marks 100 years since Antonio Gramsci's imprisonment, with six writers and academics reflecting on the legacy of the antifascist Italian revolutionary.
• At William Stout Architectural Books, Roger Conover explores book collecting as a creative process.

The through-line is simple: literature's tent is wide, and today it held a Nobel laureate, a neurologist's book list and a drinking bard from Chicago in the same frame. The adaptation bracket, meanwhile, remains open — literary television's champion awaits the vote.