Lit Hub Daily: February 22, 2021

• “Fiction should be life-changing, life-shattering. It isn’t just characters and stories.” Brian Castleberry profiles Nicola Barker, post-punk UK novelist. | Lit Hub
• Steffan Triplett on Megan Giddings’ 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
• “Only one firefly was observed alighting on a conference attendee, and that attendee was Hiranuma’s widow, Asako.” Dreux Richard attends the Japan Firefly Society’s national conference and pays tribute to the man who brought fireflies back to Wakkanai. | Lit Hub
• 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
• These books show the state of environmental racism in the US—and efforts to address it. | EcoWatch

Also on Lit Hub: Your week in virtual book events, featuring Shayla Lawson, Lauren Oyler, Jason Reynolds, and more • Sushma Subramanian on the paradox of solitude and intimacy • Read from Andromeda Romano-Lax’s latest novel, Annie and the Wolves