Lit Hub Daily: March 5, 2020

• “Frida Kahlo used photographs the way she used painted images: as a repository for her profound and sincere emotions and ideas.” On Kahlo as photographic subject. | Lit Hub Art
• Our characters of perpetual potential: Jessi Jezewska Stevens on the hidden power of the passive protagonist. | Lit Hub
• “Nights that felt unlimited like salad n’ breadsticks.” Poet Danny Cain’s odes to Olive Garden, Popeye’s, and more. | Lit Hub Food
• “For a book to become real is to read it. And so authors play with readership.” David Lerner Schwartz on Choose Your Own Adventure and literary fiction. | Lit Hub
• Inside a progressive hotbed of early 20th-century New York: On Rose Pastor and the activists of the University Settlement Society. | Lit Hub History
• Olivia Rutigliano counts down the best crime-solving writers in fiction, from Jughead Jones to Jessica Fletcher. | CrimeReads
• Parul Sehgal on Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Dee on James McBride, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• The London Book Fair, one of the world’s largest, has been canceled amid growing concerns over the coronavirus. | The Guardian
• Ahead of this year’s Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica, Nichelle Smith reflects on her experience there in 2018. | USA Today
• Under James Daunt’s management, perennially embattled bookstore Barnes & Noble is pivoting to… books. | Bloomberg Businessweek
• Cassie Chambers, author of Hill Women, discusses writing a post-Hillbilly Elegy “anti-bootstraps narrative” about life in Appalachia. | Slate
• A book about how to stop using plastic is being packaged… in plastic. | BuzzFeed
• “I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another.” The story behind Lange’s most famous photo. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Did you know they’re still making new Boxcar Children books? (And other forgotten favorites from your childhood.) | MentalFloss

Also on Lit Hub: What’s the point of plants that make us feel high? • Theodore Wheeler: Writing and confronting terror in the form of a color • Read an excerpt from Anne Enright’s new novel Actress.