Lit Hub Daily: April 21, 2020

• “To me, nonfiction is an act of translation, and the task for the writer is to bring dead letters to life.” Jessica Pearce Rotondi on writing the family saga of her missing uncle. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Joshua Sperling on the decade John Berger became an art world revolutionary. | Lit Hub Criticism
• ON THE VBC: Sue Monk Kidd on the uses of alternate history, on Fiction/Non/Fiction Live · On Sheltering, Marie Mutsuki Mockett talks food waste and farming. | Lit Hub
• “In his campaign and the first year of his presidency, Trump showed a brazen willingness to lie.” How the Trump presidency became a hotbed of conspiracy theory. | Lit Hub Politics
• Veronica Esposito on reshaping her life story, and falling out of love with modernist literature. | Lit Hub
• “Almost Animal.” A poem by Didi Jackson from the collection Moon Jar. | Lit Hub
• Nino Harataschvili talks to Lori Feathers about writing a saga of life in Soviet Georgia. | Lit Hub
• From heroes to dirtbags: Paul Levine looks at the evolution of the fictional lawyer. | CrimeReads
• Tess Taylor recommends five books about writing place in a time of crisis, from Seamus Heaney’s Wintering Out to Camille Dungy’s Trophic Cascade. | Book Marks
• On our 50th Earth day, here’s how to find a book about climate change that’s right for you. | The New York Times
• Britain’s former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy has launched an international poetry project designed to document the pandemic in verse. | The Guardian
• After a massive fundraising effort saved America’s oldest black-owned bookstore, its owners are thinking about what comes next. | ZORA
• One result of the coronavirus pandemic: A lot of us are having trouble focusing on reading. | The Chronicle of Higher Education
• A doctor in North Carolina wrote a children’s book, with illustrations from his 6-year-old son, meant to help the children of healthcare workers understand their parents’ jobs during the crisis. | WRAL
• If you need a break from Netflix, why not dive into this “unjustifiably forgotten” 1,198 page novel? | JSTOR
• The announcement of the International Booker Prize has been postponed to May in the hope of helping its winners in a struggling market for books. | The Booker Prizes

Also on Lit Hub: Ten memoirs to keep you company in isolation • Jason Rosenthal on his wife’s final column, recommending him as a good husband • Read an excerpt from Kate Milliken’s debut novel Kept Animals.