Lit Hub Daily: April 29, 2020

• “I think we need Joe Schmo because the Extraordinary One, christ or no, is not inherently likeable.” Rufi Thorpe on the narrative role of the bystander. | Lit Hub
• As if you needed another reason to move as far away as possible: a literary tour of New Zealand. | Lit Hub Travel
• ON THE VBC: Danez Smith on poetry, blackness, and friendship on Fiction/Non/Fiction Live · On Sheltering, Janelle Brown talks thrillers and confinement. | Lit Hub
• “I became what I was: a body in recline.” Ellen O’Connell Whittet on finding comfort in books when chronic pain curtailed her dance career. | Lit Hub
• “We are surrounded by the stories we need to survive.” Nick Ripatrazone talks to Jasmine Lane about the importance of finding connection in remote high school teaching. | Lit Hub
• Elizabeth Kadetsky on the memoir in essays: a reading list. | Lit Hub Memoir
• When codependency feels like a disease: Nina Renata Aron reflects on the experience of being in love with an addict. | Lit Hub Memoir
• Marc Petitjean sets out to unravel the mystery of his father’s love affair with Frida Kahlo. | Lit Hub Biography
• Quarantine comfort reading, tired tropes, and the new landscape of true crime: read a roundtable discussion with nominees for the Edgar Awards. | CrimeReads
• Pedro Páramo, Goodnight Moon, Optic Nerve, and more rapid-fire book recs from PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Chloe Aridjis. | Book Marks
• Why We Swim author Bonnie Tsui recommends five books about immersion in worlds and water, from Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. | Book Marks
• On the gloriously bizarre novelist Charles Portis, author of True Grit, who “understands that weirdness begins at home.” | The Ringer
• Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Inseparables—which she abandoned when Sartre dismissed it—will be published for the first time in 2021. | The New York Times
• Half Price Books and Gottwals Books, both used book chains, are starting to reopen stores that were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. | Publishers Weekly
• “Prison art practices resist the isolation, exploitation, and dehumanization of carceral facilities.” Nicole R. Fleetwood on artists and mass incarceration. | New York Review of Books
• M.M. Carrigran, editor of Taco Bell Quarterly (“the literary magazine for Taco Bell literature”), knows what you think. Just stop. | Vox
• Yearning for the hush of the stacks? Here are seven gorgeous libraries you can explore from home. | Atlas Obscura
• During another long, unprecedented event, World War II, book clubs were essential for some Britons in staving off boredom. | The Epoch Times

Also on Lit Hub: On The Cycle of Life, the exhibit that challenged our understanding of death and the human body • The 13 best book covers of April • Read a story from Billy O’Callaghan’s collection The Boatman.