Lit Hub Daily: July 14, 2022

TODAY: In 1916, Italian novelist and short story writer Natalia Ginzburg, who secretly edited an anti-Fascist newspaper during World War II, is born.   

• “He was known as the improbably well-informed Yankee who had a preternatural ability to sniff out genius—and bring it to the United States.” Meet John Quinn, the man who first introduced America to Pablo Picasso. | Lit Hub Art

• Off the coast of Kodiak Island, Doreen Cunningham searches for solace among nature’s gentlest of giants. | Lit Hub Nature

• “I rarely found portrayals of anyone like me—bookish and poor and surly and Brown—in the art that I enjoyed.” Erika L. Sánchez on writing for herself. | Lit Hub Memoir

• Alice Elliott Dark on how to let characters (realistically) change. | Lit Hub Craft

• Rapid-fire book recommendations from Ruth Ware. | ELLE

• An interview with Tom Perrotta: “[T]he novel exists as a form because it allows you to see both the character’s thoughts and the character’s actions, and they rarely line up.” | The Rumpus

• “Animals aren’t interesting just when they are better than us. Things that are simpler than us are actually deeply fascinating too.” Ed Yong and Alice Wong discuss ableism in science, sensory biology, and cultivating wonder. | Orion

• Where the Crawdads Sing author Delia Owens is still wanted for questioning in the 1995 death of a poacher in Zambia. | Vulture

• Lincoln Michel makes the case for the speculative epic as the literary genre for our current reality. | Esquire

• A public library in Ukraine is mailing Ukrainian books to people forced to leave the country due to Russia’s invasion. | Kyiv Post

• Aisling Twomey gives a deep dive into how books become valuable. | Book Riot

Also on Lit Hub: Amy B. Reid on translating the book she needed to read • Dispatches from the childhood of a future pilot • Read from Francesca Manfredi’s new novel, The Empire of Dirt

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