Lit Hub Daily: April 26, 2022

TODAY: In 1910, poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the first Norwegian Nobel laureate, dies at 77.  

• “Only the Ukrainian Army and its volunteers are awake.” New poetry from Ukraine by Natalia Beltchenko. | Lit Hub Ukraine

• Give a warm welcome to these 20 new books published today. | The Hub

• “Eliot could rationalize her nonparticipation with her belief that her novels were improvements for the soul. Can I?” Pamela Erens on Middlemarch and the moral value of fiction. | Lit Hub Criticism

• Better Call John Moscow: Bill Browder recounts exposing a Russian money laundering scheme and surviving Putin’s wrath. | Lit Hub

• Julie Phillips considers the mother-writers of the 1960s who refused to choose between books and babies. | Lit Hub Parenting

• We should probably be grateful for that wayward asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. | Lit Hub Paleontology

• How Soon Wiley virtually strolled Seoul for novel research, with the help of Google street view. | Lit Hub Craft

• “I sometimes envy you the peace you must be experiencing now that you are dead.” A letter from Celia Paul to the artist Gwen John. | Lit Hub Art

• “He uses words as the sea uses waves.” Langston Hughes’s 1958 review of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. | Book Marks

• Read a roundtable discussion with the Edgar nominees on the state of the crime novel in 2022. | CrimeReads

• “If you have language that pops, language that slashes, that’s what’s for me.” Helen Rosner talks to John Darnielle about songs, poetry, and (“more or less”) the secret to happiness. | The New Yorker

• Deesha Philyaw discusses being—and feeling—“very 50.”  | Oldster

• “A good guest doesn’t pretend they live in someone else’s home, they acknowledge their status and appreciate their temporary dwelling.” Noah Baldino on the pleasures of reading like a guest. | Harriet

• Working with volunteers, two British independent publishers are delivering books to Ukrainian children on the border with Romania. | BBC

• Jackson Davidow looks at Nicole Rudick’s new book on Niki de Saint Phalle, “a testament to the willful production of artistic subjectivity.” | LARB

• A tiny book produced by a young Charlotte Brontë will return to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, where it was first created. | The New York Times

• Alan Jacobs considers free speech, censorship, and “the human wreckage created by social media.”  | Hedgehog Review

Also on Lit Hub: Michelle Huneven’s notes from over a decade of restaurant criticism • The “uncanny despair” of the cruise ship narrative • Read from Uzma Aslam Khan’s latest novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali

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