Lit Hub Daily: April 1, 2021

• In the latest installment of The Longest Year: 2020+, Emily Raboteau and Emily Schiffer capture mothering small children in a pandemic. | Lit Hub

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• “I’ve always felt that if you can’t change your history, you can change your geography for a time.” Georgette Moger on finding solace as a young widow in Paris. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Against the craft advice “read, read, and read books,” a directive that overlooks writers from backgrounds of scarcity, displacement, and war. | Lit Hub Craft

• “In my younger years exploring alternative music, a centered reflection of my Black-girl self was a vision I had yearned to see.” Dawnie Walton searches for herself in rock and roll. | Lit Hub Music

• April book recommendations based on your zodiac sign, featuring Oyeyemi with the Leo energy and some casual public crying for Cancers (we love you). | Lit Hub Reading Lists

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• Why Orville Schell decided to make The Big Switch from nonfiction to fiction… in his 80s. | Lit Hub

• Marcia Butler recommends six books that taught her unexpected craft lessons, from Akhil Sharma’s emotional ambiguity to Lee K. Abbott’s dialogue. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Truth-seeking, empathy-building, and details, details, details: Nancy Johnson on the writing techniques she learned as a TV reporter. | Lit Hub

• 10 crime novels to check out this April, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. | CrimeReads

• Olivia Laing on Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd, Sophie Gilbert on Melissa Febos’ Girlhood, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks

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• A leaked internal document reveals that Amazon’s Twitter “ambassadors” were chosen based on their “great sense[s] of humor,” and “includes examples of how its ambassadors can snarkily respond to criticisms of the company and its CEO.” LOL. | The Intercept

• “He was very obsessively devoted to promoting his own interests. I can live with that. That’s a very human quality.” Blake Bailey discusses his new biography of Philip Roth. | Los Angeles Times

• On the life of Aphra Behn, 17th-century British spy and perhaps the first English woman in history to work as a professional writer. | Narratively

• “Whether or not I wanted to, I began to see myself in my history, through the lens of my obsessions.” Hanif Abdurraqib on his latest book, social media, and vulnerability. | Shondaland

• “I used to be running through the field, and now I’m walking and paying attention to every stalk of grass.” Elle Nash on creative processes, her new book, and the body as a boundary between yourself and the world. | Full Stop

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• Maaza Mengiste has created a digital archive of photos, oral histories, and other material on the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian War. | Brittle Paper

• “How much should we care about the identity of a translator?” Tim Parks on a changing vocation. | New York Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: On the underusing Larry Doby and what baseball owes Jackie Robinson • Inside the long friendship of James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop • Read from Kamel Daoud’s newly translated novel Zabor, or the Psalms (trans. Emma Ramadan)