Lit Hub Daily: April 8, 2020

• How to bartend: Rabih Alameddine on life, death, and soccer (during the last pandemic). | Lit Hub
• “Did humans choose wolves or did wolves choose humans?” Helen Pilcher on the interspecies bond that changed the course of human history. | Lit Hub Science
• “The goal of my writing has never been to reenact my or anyone else’s trauma.” Rowan Hisayo Buchanan on negotiating wellness and sickness. | Lit Hub
• “At the turn of the century, Mecklenburgh Square was a radical address.” Visit the quiet London enclave where Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, and others forged a home. | Lit Hub History
• How to pay attention in a time of crisis: A reading list for the (understandably) distracted. | Lit Hub
• ON THE VBC: On Joining Conversation, three sports journalists discuss life in a world without… sports · Chelsea Bieker talks about feeling a little too familiar with Joe Exotic, on Sheltering. | Lit Hub
• “Autistic thinkers welcome the participation of animals, trees, objects, and even weather into our human world of thought and action.” Chris Martin on what we can learn from each other—and the natural world. | Lit Hub Nature
• “February, Rain,” a new poem by Tess Taylor. | Lit Hub
• Priestdaddy, My Dark Vanessa, The Brothers Karamazov, and more rapid-fire book recs from Cat Person author Kristen Roupenian. | Book Marks
• From Cowtown to Crimetown: Andrew Welsh-Huggins explains why Columbus, Ohio is the next center of crime writing. | CrimeReads
• “I think of literature as really the dream life of the culture that creates it.” Jennifer Egan talks to the PEN Pod about getting over Covid-19 and what we should do now. | PEN America
• An investigation by ProPublica and The Atlantic reveals how Amazon’s self-publishing division has been used as a gateway for extreme right-wing views. | ProPublica
• Annie Ernaux revisits her younger self for an English-speaking audience. | The New York Times
• Rebecca Makkai compiled an oral history of Chicago’s 1990 ACT UP demonstration. | Chicago Magazine
• Montaigne’s “Of Experience” speaks to “how to live when life itself comes under attack,” a relevant lesson for 2020. | The Paris Review
• Ron Charles on learning from Walden, “the world’s most famous act of social distancing.” | The Washington Post
• Etgar Keret, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and more writers on their Passover 2020 plans. | New York Review of Books

Also on Lit Hub: On early Judaism and its conception of the afterlife • Moby-Dick‘s powerful message for the Atomic Age • Read a story from Souvankham Thammavongsa’s collection How to Pronounce Knife.