Lit Hub Daily: March 26, 2021

• “I don’t think my glory will ever be greater. Everywhere there is a passionate curiosity about me.” When Dostoevsky hit the St. Petersburg literary scene, like some sort of Book Twitter celebrity. | Lit Hub Biography

• Fleeting narrators and disappearing text: Daniel Heller-Roazen tries to pin down a little-known short story by Franz Kafka. | Lit Hub Criticism

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• “When I translate, I feel as if I’m in another dimension.” Ilan Stavans talks to Peter Cole about the art of translation. | Lit Hub Translation

• How E.O. Wilson’s concern over the rate of species extinctions, population declines, and habitat losses on Earth—due to human actions—converged in his writing. | Lit Hub Nature

• “Perhaps we return to the lives of tragic literary ladies for less savory reasons, too: because ultimately, we still enjoy rubbernecking at female pain.” Kelsey Osgood on the trope of Tragic Literary Woman. | Lit Hub

• A biography of Francis Bacon, a history of female TV pioneers, and a darkly comic Japanese workplace novel all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks

• WATCH: Danielle Evans, Megan Giddings, and Deesha Philyaw perform readings as part of the Franklin Park Virtual Reading Series. | Lit Hub Virtual Book Channel

• “We, too, are sitting around the fire. We, as readers, exist as audiences and participants. We are implicated.” Katie Yee on Diane Cook, Lydia Millet, and the language of climate fiction. | LARB

• “The best way I know to understand her, the site where my retina and hers overlap, is in language.” Rhea Ramakrishnan on her grandmother and the relationship between language and colonization. | Ploughshares

• INTERVIEW WITH A JOURNAL: The senior editors of NOON pull back on the curtain on running a nonprofit lit mag and how to submit. | Lit Hub

• Finland has a national epic poem that contains forest demons, wolves that stalk the deadlands, and a divine maiden who gets pregnant by the wind—and you can read a translation of it right this way. | Public Domain Review

• The story of Roberta Saltzman, who built a legendary library of hundreds of Jewish cookbooks from the past and present—the largest in the world. | Atlas Obscura

• Emily Bernard revisits Audre Lorde’s groundbreaking explorations of power, racism, and the body in her writing. | New Republic

• “Words that my ancestors sung to cope under white supremacy have the same power for me, and I can carry them wherever I go.” Leah Nicole Whitcomb on the power of gospel music. | The Rumpus

• Translator James Byrne highlights literary activism amid the military violence in Myanmar. | World Literature Today

Also on Lit Hub: Asma Uddin on the complexities of the liberal-Islam coalition • Chris Colin asks poets and writers to contemplate a simpler existence—one without internet • Read a story from Carribean Fragoza’s new collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You