TODAY: In 1839, the initials “O.K.” are first published in The Boston Morning Post, meant as an abbreviation for “oll korrect,” a popular slang misspelling of “all correct” at the time.
- THESE TIMES: So, do you really want to help bookstores? · “March the Ninth Twenty Twenty,” a poem from Italian quarantine · Actors online are reading sonnets to soothe our anxieties. | Lit Hub Coronavirus Coverage
- HBO’s The Plot Against America betrays Philip Roth—and that’s a good thing. | Lit Hub TV
- “The audacity of the called shot staggered the imagination. No one before that time tried to hit a home run.” On Babe Ruth and the moment that changed baseball forever. | Lit Hub Sports
- “Zed is what a dystopia looks like when written by a non-cynic.” Fran Bigman and Joanna Kavenna in conversation. | Lit Hub
- Distract yourself (or your homeschooling 8-year-old) with these hyper-close-up portraits of ordinary bugs. | Lit Hub Science
- Carl Rollyson on uncovering the hidden love lives of Sylvia Plath and William Faulkner. | Lit Hub
- “The natural environment records impressions of past trauma.” Kristine Ong Muslim on personal and environmental grief. | Lit Hub
- The Remains of the Day, The Underground Railroad, Night Watch, and more rapid-fire book recs from Sarah Perry. | Book Marks
- Crime and the City heads to Bogota, a city which has seen decades of trauma—and also produced some of fiction’s most powerful stories. | CrimeReads
- In case you need them (and you probably do), here are some books in which no bad things happen. | Tor.com
- “In some ways, with covid-19, we are as vulnerable as the Victorians were.” Amy Davidson Sorkin on Bleak House, Jane Eyre, and social distancing. | The New Yorker
- Listen, it might finally be time to become a bathtub reader. | EW
- Multiple organizations are working to organize emergency relief funds for financially vulnerable authors and booksellers. | The Bookseller
- Kodak Black will donate more than 600 books to kids in one Florida school county. | XXL Mag
- “Most of us are perennially short of time, and now we’re left hanging in it.” Olivia Laing on the loneliness of our current reality. | The New York Times
- Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is a dystopian novel for the social distancing era. | Slate
Also on Lit Hub: “March the Ninth Twenty Twenty”: A poem by Mariangela Gualtieri, trans. by
Lucy Rand and Clarissa Botsford • So, is daydreaming good for us? • Read a story by Kira Proctor from The New England Review.
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