Lit Hub Daily: April 30, 2020

• Reconsidering the American myth of a distant paradise: Greil Marcus on The Great Gatsby as a blues fable of the Great Depression. | Lit Hub
• “Love extends in strange ways across the border between the healthy and the sick.” Gabriela Wiener writes from the midst of coronavirus in Madrid. | Lit Hub: Life in a Pandemic
• On the 1930s antifascist writing of Dorothy Thompson, who understood that demagogic leaders can gain power anywhere, anytime. | Lit Hub Politics
• 20 writers offer up one joy and one worry of this moment in pandemic, including Ada Limón, Eduardo C. Corral, Tyehimba Jess, and more. | Lit Hub: Life in a Pandemic
• “Could I have loved in dignity in Communist Poland?” Tomasz Jedrowski on writing the story of Polish queerness. | Lit Hub
• Monica Sok talks to Louis Elliot about writing the Cambodian story beyond trauma. | Lit Hub
• ON THE VBC: Rufi Thorpe talks queer friendship, unruly bodies, and RuPaul’s Drag Race, on Sheltering · Watch Danielle Lazarin, Audrey Olivero, and Jennifer Rosner on the Antibody Reading Series. | Lit Hub
• “Inside the temple, visitors cannot know, cherries are blooming.” Marie Mutsuki Mockett on reading Basho with her ten-year-old. | The Paris Review
• In the latest entry to the After Decameron project, in which artists and writers add to an ongoing collective story, Artun Özgüner examines the things we leave behind: gloves, masks, cigarette butts and all. | Open Space
• Support is growing for a petition asking the Poetry Foundation to allocate some of its sizable yearly budget to struggling writers. | Publishers Weekly
• “Who knows how we’ll feel about sharing books with strangers in the future?” On missing the library, a place where we could say yes to everything. | Human Parts
• “Ironically, I already felt like I was in quarantine.”Fellows of the Fine Arts Work Center report from life in Provincetown during the coronavirus pandemic. | Los Angeles Times
• Barnes & Noble warehouse workers are protesting unsafe conditions at their workplace, which employs 800 people. | NJ.com
• An online auction to help comic book shops has raised over $430,000 dollars. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Lucas Iberico Lozada on newly-translated Latin American stories defy colonial myths • A joy and a worry during COVID-19 from Ada Limón, Tyehimba Jess, and more writers • Read an excerpt from Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, trans. by Sam Bett and David Boyd.