Lit Hub Daily: April 6, 2020

• THESE TIMES: André Aciman on how pandemics change us and the life to come · Coronavirus is a humanitarian crisis, not a war: Nathaniel Popkin on the consequences of male inferiority · Lauren Markham remembers the last train trip before everything changed · Shobha Rao on letting birdsong fill this new pandemic silence. | Life in a Pandemic
• “This weird optimism that sneaks into my work has forced me to articulate what I value and want.” Veronica Roth on writing dystopian fiction that longs for a better world. | Lit Hub
• On Helen Hamilton Gardener’s fight against sexist science in the 19th century. | Lit Hub History
• From a deadly virus novel to a work of darkly feminist sci-fi, here are five SFF books to ease your April isolation. | Book Marks
• “In the worst times, we can try to find stability in the smallest things.” Esmé Weijun Wang applies the lessons she learned living with chronic illness to the coronavirus pandemic. | The Cut
• “It feels so gay to me.” Carmen Maria Machado is rewatching The Lord of the Rings right now. | Jezebel
• These books about outdoor adventures put girls and non-binary kids at the center of the story. | Outside
• “The challenge of rebuilding a language that’s been suppressed for decades is not simple.” Here’s how indigenous language revivalists are trying to do just that. | The Believer
• “I just want to say that history, when it arrives, may not look as you expect, based on the reading of history books.” Read a new story by George Saunders. | The New Yorker
• Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson, and more writers share snippets of their lives in lockdown. | The Guardian
• Here’s the inevitable list of books to read if you loved Tiger King. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: Meet Nancy Wake, the most incredible woman you’ve never heard of • An exhibition on Gabriel García Márquez’s road to literary greatness • Read an excerpt from Alessandro Manzoni’s 1842 classic The Betrothed (trans. Michael Moore).