Lit Hub Daily: March 2, 2022

TODAY: In 1870, The Seven Brothers (Seitsemän veljestä), a novel by Finnish author Aleksis Kivi, is published first time in several thin booklets.  

• “You’ve got to live somewhere you aren’t afraid to die.” Newly translated poetry from Ukraine by Serhiy Zhadan. | Lit Hub

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• “Sometimes things line up in such a way that it becomes unbearable.” Read an excerpt from Mondegreen, a new novel of wartime Ukraine. | Lit Hub

• Why are children hungry for scientific explanations while adults have little appetite, if any? | Lit Hub Science

• Kathryn Davis considers the “delectable inexplicability” of Lost and coming to terms with the unknowable. | Lit Hub TV

• Former Nike director Merl Code reveals the “underground fight club” that is college basketball. | Lit Hub Sports

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• Kathleen Stone recommends books by writers who debuted between ages 60 and 93. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• “Maternal love had failed him; painting had failed him; now romantic love had proved as treacherous as the rest.” Ruth Brandon on Marcel Duchamp’s first three great rejections. | Lit Hub Biography

• Andrea Yaryura Clark connects with the children of the disappeared  during Argentina’s “dirty war.” | Lit Hub History

• The Little Prince, Walden, A Wizard of Earthsea, and more rapid-fire book recs from Betina González. | Book Marks

• “For me, Yiddish will never be easy, but I can read it, with effort. It has ceased to be a wall, barring me from history; instead, it became a door.” Molly Crabapple on the joy of Yiddish books. | NYRB

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• Sasha Frere-Jones on Lucy Sante’s layered portrayals of New York. | Bookforum

• “Reality seemed like a cheap copy of Tokarczuk’s world.” Marek Makowski reads The Books of Jacob with—and against—the Riverhead Reader’s Companion. | Los Angeles Review of Books

• “We walk all night. There is no end to the cars, no end to the people walking the other way.” Elena Kostyuchenko’s dispatch from Poland and Ukraine. | n+1

• A Missouri school district reversed its decision to ban eight books from schools, including one by Toni Morrison, after being sued by the ACLU. | The Root

• These Ukrainian books are available in English translation. | Book Riot

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• Meghan O’Rourke discusses writing, sickness, and the limitations of stories about illness. | Guernica

Also on Lit Hub: Sarah Polley on grief, girlhood, and scoliosis • A reading list of later in life debuts • Read from Edvard Hoem’s newly translated novel, Haymaker in Heaven (tr. Tara Chace)

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