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This week, writer Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her upcoming February 2024 novel, THE SNOW FOREST, from publication. In a moving vlog post (I saw it on Instagram), she explained that, over the weekend, she had heard from many devastated readers in Ukraine who could not understand why she would publish a book set in Russia in this time of war.

The story is a novelized version of the real-life Russian Lykov family, who fled to Siberia in the 1930s in the face of religious persecution....