Lit Hub Daily: March 24, 2020

• THESE TIMES: Francesca Marciano on the new silences filling the streets of Rome · Want to help a bookstore? Buy a gift card · And don’t forget bookstore workers! | Lit Hub Coronavirus Coverage
• “We look for evidence of race not because it mattered to them but because it matters now.” Katy Simpson Smith on viewing Blackness through the lives of the Medici. | Lit Hub History
• Fragmented narratives are broken, independent, and honest: Sinéad Gleeson in praise of the non-linear form. | Lit Hub
• How young William Faulkner’s time in the French Quarter influenced his still-developing writing style. | Lit Hub
• Cameron Esposito recommends books for a queer road trip (or a queer staycation, as present circumstances demand). | Lit Hub
• Sharks in the Time of Saviors author Kawai Strong Washburn recommends five great books on Hawai’i. | Book Marks
• A month of literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of March. | Book Marks
• “Dread is at the core of all dark fiction.” Rachel Harrison on dread in five short works by women. | CrimeReads
• “Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute.” Jill Lepore on our literature of contagion (and the antidote that is reading itself). | The New Yorker
• Get lost in a brief history of word games, from Sator Squares to anti-riddles. | The Paris Review
• What’s the deal with the “Fitzgerald” quarantine letter going around? (Spoiler: He didn’t write it). | Oprah Magazine
• Book tours are canceled, but authors are using social media to prop one another up. | Publishers Weekly
• “Memorizing is an act of will and of the imagination. I felt my brain shifting as if it was physically creating a place to gather the lines into a disorganized sock drawer.” Maybe now’s the time to memorize some sonnets? | The Smart Set
• If Earth doesn’t appeal to you at the moment (fair enough), here are some novels about our future in space. | The Guardian
• “[A]ny critic who wants to write something lasting—who believes that criticism can be a species of literature—must write partly out of aggression.” On T.S. Eliot and the role of the poet-critic. | The New Criterion

Also on Lit Hub: On the rarity of a solitary tree • Can feminist manifestoes of the past wake us up today? • Read an excerpt from Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel The Glass Hotel.