Lit Hub Daily: March 31, 2020

• THESE TIMES: In a pandemic, how do you make the case for an art emergency? · Nick Ripatrazone on trying to teach high school during a global pandemic.  ON THE VBC: Deb Olin Unferth talks to Maris Kreizman on Sheltering · Breanne Fahs talks to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on the premiere of Rekindled (which revives canceled book tour conversations!). | Life in a Pandemic
• “OH MY GOD, I hope Michelle Obama never reads my stupid books.” Samantha Irby on riffing, writer’s block, and What’s Happenin!! | Lit Hub
• Rebecca Dinerstein Knight on her mentor Mark Strand, lover of voicemails, roaster of chickens, writer of poems. | Lit Hub
• A month of the coronavirus pandemic, the love lives of Plath and Faulkner, and more of the Lit Hub staff’s favorite stories of March. | Lit Hub
• “In the absence of a mentor, perhaps what Mary Bennet really needed was a reading list.” Janice Hadlow on learning from the smartest women in the room. | Lit Hub
• “in broad dayliGht black girls look ghost.” A poem by Roya Marsh from the collection dayliGht. | Lit Hub
• Honor Moore recommends five books about women’s choices and consequences, from To the Lighthouse to The Lover. | Book Marks
• “As screwed up as this country is, we can still produce a Don DeLillo who can understand and explain us.” Gerald Howard makes a case for why Don DeLillo deserves the Nobel Prize. | Bookforum
• “Love, for her, is premised on a delicate balance between the reliable presence of another person and the freedom to inhabit one’s private universe.” Sheila Heti on Tove Jansson. | The New Yorker
• Lost track of what the book world is doing to support its readers and employees? Margaret Renki provides a helpful summary. | The New York Times
• You might be living in sweats, but at least you can visualize the protagonists of some spring books in very fancy outfits. | Garage
• Eldred Jones, a prominent literary critic and editor who shaped the study of modern African literature, has died at 95. | The Guardian
• “By Friday, I was exhausted by my new job and convinced that public school teachers should be paid a billion dollars a year.” Emily Raboteau on homeschooling during a pandemic. | New York Review of Books
• The Authors Guild and others are criticizing the National Emergency Library project, saying that it violates copyright law. | Publishers Weekly

Also on Lit Hub: The 14 best book covers of March • An ode to the lemon tree, the most important tree in the garden • Read a story from Lily Tuck’s collection Heathcliff Redux.