This Week in Literary History: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is Performed for the First Time (Probably)

By Literary HubAugust 3, 2026

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. The earliest existing eyewitness account of a performance of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth comes to us from the astrologer Simon Forman, who saw the play at the Globe Theater on April 20,

Read article

Culture & Arts Literature & Essays

Comments

No comments yet.

Last Days at the Aqueduct: New York’s Rundown Racetrack

“Everyone in a hat—we called them fedoras back then. You probably never heard of a fedora.”

Max CallimanopulosAug 4, 2026

The Paris Review

My Year of Tests and Arbitration

“Let me be clear: I don’t ever want to see this story again.”

Tarpley HittAug 3, 2026

Literary Hub

Awake Awake

All is recollection save for the slender membrane of now. Every present thought, every present feeling, collides with a league of their familial ghosts. And if our lives in this moment seem flimsy, that is because they are. We dwell

Lit Hub ExcerptsAug 5, 2026

Literary Hub

Rumpelstiltskin is My Unlikely Writing Companion

A few years ago, scrolling through social media when I should have been writing, I came across a photo of the Lady Bird edition of Rumpelstiltskin. Struggling to remember the specifics of the story, I googled it. There, in the

Louise NealonAug 5, 2026

The New Yorker

Free quota

An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist’s Afterlife as a BookTok Star

Jacqueline Harpman wrote her best-known works in the nineteen-nineties, but her fiction’s elegiac loneliness seems to anticipate our own solitary, screen-bound era.

Katy WaldmanAug 3, 202610 min read

Public Books

“Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins

How do the families and friends of those struggling with addiction perceive that addiction, cope with it, and try (or fail) to love that person anyway? The post “Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins appeared first on Public Books.

Megan CumminsAug 4, 2026