Lit Hub Daily: March 26, 2020

• THESE TIMES: Aminatta Forna diverges from the homeschool lesson plan with Chinua Achebe · Will virtual book events lead to virtual sales? · Bill Hayes heads downtown to buy a book, just before the stores close. | Life in a Pandemic
• Today in alternate timelines: Bob Odenkirk came “within an inch” of playing Michael Scott on The Office. | Lit Hub TV
• 12 great writers on 12 great birds (from Whitman to Thoreau to Muir and more). | Lit Hub Nature
• A trip to Niagara Falls, a strange light in the sky, and an interesting trip to the doctor’s office: how the myth of alien abduction was born. | Lit Hub Science (?)
• Life and death in Białowieża: Nick Hunt journeys to the depths of Europe’s oldest primeval forest. | Lit Hub Nature
• “My Dark Vanessa is a minefield in which language itself has been weaponized”: 5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• Consider yourself lucky not to be isolating with W.H. Auden, incorrigibly messy roommate. | The Paris Review
• From survivalist stories to tales of solo expeditions, these books composed in isolation may have some lessons for our present state of quarantine. | The Washington Post
• How can you keep kids from spending too much time with screens as they quarantine at home? These books are one place to start. | The Chicago Tribune
• Hemingway once spent a summer quarantined with his sick toddler, his wife, and his mistress—but don’t worry, “he actually took quite nicely to it.” | Town and Country
• On Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the seminal novel of the 1918 flu pandemic. | Texas Monthly
• Richard Marek, a longtime editor who worked with Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Robert Ludlum, and many others, has died at 86. | The New York Times
• Happy First Dante Day! Italy begins this annual recognition today, as the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death nears. | ANSA

Also on Lit Hub: Read an excerpt from Amir Ahmadi Arian’s American debut, Then the Fish Swallowed Him.