Lit Hub Daily: March 11, 2020

• Yan Lianke, in a letter to his students: “I hope that each of you, and all of us who’ve experienced the catastrophic COVID-19 will become people who remember.” | Lit Hub
• Fill the Thomas Cromwell-shaped hole in your heart with these ten great works of historical fiction. | Lit Hub
• “How do we know what’s actually happening outside the dark vault of our skulls?” Will Storr on the neuroscience behind the world we see. | Lit Hub Science
• Terminal pain and the origins of the end-of-life movement: Gerald Posner on Cicely Saunders, the UK nurse-turned-physician who fought for the rights of the dying. | Lit Hub History
• “Most days I do not hear the siren. When I do, I watch my students’ faces and indulge a spasm of prayer.” Erica Berry on teaching under lockdown in America. | Lit Hub Politics
• When it comes to historical documents, spotting forgeries is a fraught and risky business. | Lit Hub
• Tove Jansson falls in love: The Moomin creator on five decades of life with Tuulikki Pietilä. | Lit Hub
• The Art of the Hand-Sell: 14 indie booksellers rave about their favorite reads. | Book Marks
• Katie Orphan rounds up the essential crime novels of Los Angeles, from Mildred Pierce to Devil in a Blue Dress and beyond. | CrimeReads
• Cool, bored, passive, estranged: Jess Bergman on the affected young women of our new “literature of relentless detachment.” | The Baffler
• Peter Rabbit 2, based on more of Beatrix Potter’s classic stories, is the second major film release to be delayed because of the coronavirus. | The Hollywood Reporter
• “The plague was Shakespeare’s secret weapon. He didn’t ignore it. He took advantage of it.” So… there’s that! | Slate
• Here are the finalists for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. | The Hub
• Since 2016, the Echo mobile library has been bringing books to Greek refugee camps. | The Guardian
• American Dirt wasn’t the first time Oprah’s Book Club has entered the fray of publishing-related controversy. | Los Angeles Times
• “No one should feel sorry for me or any other writer in this position. But I do kind of envy the writers who don’t have this discourse around their book.” Read a profile of Kate Elizabeth Russell. | Buzzfeed News

Also on Lit Hub: Two poems by Carolyn Forché from the collection In the Lateness of the World • Honor Moore on the secrets mothers and daughters keep from one another • Read an excerpt from Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut novel My Dark Vanessa.