Literary Hub - Lit Hub Daily: February 22, 2021

• “Fiction should be life-changing, life-shattering. It isn’t just characters and stories.” Brian Castelberry profiles Nicola Barker, post-punk UK novelist. | Lit Hub
• Steffan Triplett on Megan Giddings’s Lakewood, “required reading in the conversation about Black horror.” | Lit Hub Criticism
• For a mere $4,200, you can own a rare set of Bonibooks, a pre-Penguin paperback series that attempted the “profane” act of marketing literature to the people. | Lit Hub
• Yaba Blay on the history of race in New Orleans, where “Creoles functioned as a buffer class that helped whites to maintain their dominant status and keep unmixed Blacks in their place.” | Lit Hub History
• Michael J. Stephen on how we came to understand the “vital and transcendent” act of breathing (and why we hover over our sleeping newborns). | Lit Hub Science
• Station Eleven, LaRose, How to Be Both, and more rapid-fire book recs from K Chess. | Book Marks
• Dreux Richard attends the Japan Firefly Society’s national conference and pays tribute to the man who brought fireflies back to Wakkanai. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Ever wondered which academic press best represents your core being? Take this quiz and find out! | Public Books
• “In Strayed’s hands, the advice column was a radical therapeutic experience, less like ‘Hints from Heloise’ and more like downing a cup of ayahuasca.” Looking for answers in the age of peak advice. | The New Yorker
• Reading this year’s NBCC Awards finalists: Jacob M. Appel on Riva Lehrer’s Golem Girl. | Lit Hub
• “I don’t have the emotional and intellectual energy to give to these shadowy people to bring them out of the shadows.” On how the lockdown is stifling the creativity of writers. | The Guardian 
• How literary titan Toni Morrison transformed book publishing forever and nurtured the talents of Black authors. | ZORA
• Remembering Bay Area author Anthony Veasna So, and the variety of lives he changed. | n+1
• “What does it mean to use, as Hazzard does, the individual moments in one woman’s life as a way to discuss the end of an empire?” Unpacking the novels of Shirley Hazzard. | New Republic
• “Vulnerable communities of color face more and more serious exposure to environmental hazards and have more limited access to economic, social, and political remedies.” These books show the state of environmental racism in the US—and efforts to address it. | EcoWatch

Eley Williams talks about Mountweazels, fictitious dictionary entries
that read like stories, on First Draft. 
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On The History of Literature, Anna North reimagines an America that actually treats mothers well... through an alternate history of the Wild West. 
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What if Martin Luther King Jr. and Rachel Carson had met? Listen to J. Drew Lanham’s narrated essay about the power and necessity of convergence, on Emergence Magazine.
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Richard Grinker discusses how capitalism helped create the stigma
around mental illness, on Keen On.