Lit Hub Daily: March 12, 2020

• Na Zhong on how coronavirus has ground Chinese publishing to a halt—and made existing problems worse. | Lit Hub
• “Why, looking for new ferns.” Emily Temple finally does a close reading of The Secret History’s chilling prologue. | Lit Hub
• “The next time you go to a literary reading or event, watch and see: are there steps up to the stage?” Amanda Leduc on the “inaccessible forests” of the literary world. | Lit Hub
• Remember when Trump threatened to target Iranian cultural sites? This is what they actually look like. | Lit Hub Politics
• Andreas Liebe Delset’s dispatches from the insular, independent world of Nordic restaurant kitchens. | Lit Hub Food
• Race and spectacle in the circuses of Gilded Age America: Jacob Dorman on the creation of an audience for racist stereotypes. | Lit Hub History
• Deanna Raybourn on royal scandals through the centuries, featuring poisonings, affairs, and questionable wardrobe choices. | CrimeReads
• Daniel Mendelsohn on Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, Katy Waldman on Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Nonexistence, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Meet the doctors submitting poems to medical journals as a way of exploring “the fragility, tenacity and universality of the human experience.” | Los Angeles Times
• Stephen Metcalf on the shortcomings of Ezra Klein’s new book and the impulse “to offer capital-E Explanations for our political behavior.” | The New Yorker
• “She is, essentially, a coddled asshole who is never put in her place except by Mr. Knightley, the man she—spoiler alert, for those who haven’t gotten around to the novel over the past 200 years—eventually marries.” Hillary Kelly on why Emma is still Jane Austen’s “most pleasurable heroine to watch.” | Vulture
• The film adaptation of the 1929 classic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz is a hit in Germany, where it netted 11 German Film Award nominations. | The Hollywood Reporter
• Too much informational noise around you? Bilal Qureshi recommends a few books on minimalism and silence. | The Washington Post
• “Asian Americans are still invisible. We still haven’t had our reckoning.” Cathy Park Hong on racial consciousness, comedy-as-narrative device, and canon building. | SSENSE
• Does Hachette’s cancellation of Woody Allen’s memoir signal a sea change in the publishing industry? | The Outline

Also on Lit Hub: Shakespeare and the culture wars: On the movement for color-blind casting • On Robert Frank’s San Francisco, the imperfect picture that transformed 20th-century photography • Read an excerpt from Laura Zigman’s new novel Separation Anxiety.