TODAY: In 1932, English writer and one of the main film critics for The New Yorker in the 1960s and 1970s, Penelope Gilliatt is born.
- THESE TIMES: Diane Seuss is not yet ready to die, economy be damned · How to spend 42 days alone in a a room · Lynne Tillman, for a moment, goes outside · Bess Kalb talks to Maris Kreizman on a new episode of Sheltering. | Lit Hub
- “I often faced men who didn’t like a girl telling them what wine they should buy.” Sommelier Victoria James on serving a $650 dollar bottle of wine to a racist idiot. | Lit Hub Food
- “What happens to the nature of loneliness when you live in isolation, when language fades and landscape takes over?” Tishani Doshi on seclusion and life along the coast. | Lit Hub
- Bettye Kearse on the complicated lineage of her ancestors, and “the founding father of [her] African-American family,” James Madison. | Lit Hub History
- Cai Emmons recommends nine thoroughly unabashed books about bodies. | Lit Hub
- “We have to fight for everything. Everything.” The story of one Utah county’s decades-long struggle for the Native American vote. | Lit Hub History
- Struggling to switch from print to audio? Victoria Helen Stone has some tips for how to go from audiobook failure to audiobook addict. | CrimeReads
- “Mandel is a portraitist of reinvented lives”: Lori Feathers on the novels of Emily St. John Mandel. | Book Marks
- “I tried to hoard at Whole Foods the other day, and came away with two steaks and a pouch of dried coconut.” David Sedairs is not very good at this. | The New Yorker
- If you have some extra time on your hands, why not use it to help librarians and archivists with their “digital detective work”? | Atlas Obscura
- Stuck inside with kids? Here are some audiobooks that families can listen to together. | The Washington Post
- The impact of closing public libraries goes way beyond books—especially in communities where people rely on them for shelter and safety. | WIRED
- Though it will be entirely virtual, the Minneapolis-based book festival Wordplay will go on with the more than 100 original participants expected to appear. Keep it up! | Forbes
- A New York federal judge is allowing PEN America to proceed with a lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of violating the First Amendment by revoking press badges and security clearances. | The Hollywood Reporter
- While you’re staying out of the mosh pit, read one of the 50 greatest rock memoirs of all time. | Rolling Stone
Also on Lit Hub: Abbie Greaves on the merits of silence • Read an excerpt from Alberto Tyszka’s newly-translated novel The Last Days of El Comandante, trans. by Rosalind Harvey and Jessie Mendez Sayer.
