Lit Hub Daily: February 23, 2021

• “As a fiction writer, I’ve oft repeated that an author is not her characters. Now, I find myself explaining that my characters are also not my characters.” Julia Fine on writing Margaret Wise Brown into her novel (and besmirching her memory in the eyes of a Goodreads reviewer). | Lit Hub
• Matthew Gavin Frank recommends 11 nonfiction books that feature things that take flight, from flamingos to moths to… fear. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• “When I was my son’s age, this wall-to-wall whiteness, which he looked at with discerning and culturally sophisticated, city-born eyes, was all I knew.” Rebecca Carroll reflects on parenting a Black son in white America. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Jed S. Rakoff looks to lessons of the past—including eugenics and lobotomies—to consider the dangers of the legal system relying too heavily on neuroscience. | Lit Hub Science
• How Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, Clarissa, played a role in the late Enlightenment and stoked empathy in readers. | Lit Hub History
• Jason Dearen on the deadly fungus that created a public health crisis when, spread by a corrupt compounding pharmacy, it developed a taste for human blood. | CrimeReads
• A month of literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of February. | Book Marks
• “As a writer, I understand how things go from thought to paper. You meet this character you’ve created in your head, and you get to keep revisiting it.” Stacey Abrams on her new thriller and why she stopped using a pseudonym. | Variety
• How Viet Thanh Nguyen’s work elevates “an outsider’s voice with an insider’s megaphone.” | New Yorker
• Reading this year’s NBCC Award finalists: Colette Bancroft on Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. | Lit Hub
• “Even as a monster, it seemed, there was no place for people who looked like me in Tolkien’s world.” Namina Forna on Lord of the Rings and non-white representation in fantasy. | The Guardian
• On the work of the Undocupoets—“a group fighting to end citizenship-based discrimination in poetry publishing and contests.” | Los Angeles Times
• Te-Ping Chen talks to Jane Ciabattari about modern China, generational fault lines, and the inherent drama of the home. | Lit Hub
• R.O. Kwon examines the all-too-common conflation of kink with abuse. | The Cut
• “The Lying Life of Adults is a bracing reminder of the complexity of class and of the variegated ways in which human beings process what they lack and decide to fill that void.” On Elena Ferrante’s class fictions. | The Nation
• Elizabeth Kolbert recommends books on the relationship between humans and the environment. | The Week

Also on Lit Hub: Elizabeth Becker on the impacts of women war reporters Kate Webb, Catherine Leroy, and Frances FitzGerald • David Roberts on the political work of Mark Maryboy • Read from Noémi Lefebvre’s newly translated novel, Poetics of Work (trans. Sophie Lewis)