Lit Hub Daily: May 1, 2020

TODAY: In 1803, Irish poet James Clarence Mangan is born.

• “Look at this chaos, the writer seems to say; isn’t it chaotic?” Maddie Crum looks at the internet novel. | Lit Hub
• We’re back, and we continue to have opinions! Here’s round six of our personalized quarantine book recommendations. | Lit Hub
• Gill Hornby on Cassandra, the lesser known Austen sister who was nevertheless “crucial to the development of Jane as a writer.” | Lit Hub
• “There is an historical clarity that photographs of war often promise but rarely produce.” How Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag looked at photos of violence. | Lit Hub
• The abnormalizing of the world: A conversation on mental illness, memoir writing, and more, with Marin Sandy and Sarah C. Townsend. | Lit Hub
• Lawrence Wright’s prescient pandemic novel, a biography of Henry Kissinger, and a tale of Compton cowboys all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• New voices, rising stars, and old favorites: all the crime and mystery books you need to read this May. | CrimeReads
• “Barbed and spurred, poems catch in your chest; they get stuck in your head like songs.” Or, why now is the perfect time to memorize a poem. | The Cut
• “To rely solely on books isn’t always enough—it’s also those human interactions.” On the uncertain future of bookstores. | Texas Observer
• The experience of the translators of Dan Brown’s fourth novel was so extraordinary that it inspired a film—the French thriller Les Traducteurs. | The Guardian
• Celes Tisdale’s poetry workshops at Attica State Prison in the early 1970s provided models of socially-engaged literature during a period of trauma. | The Boston Review
• The paradoxes of the pandemic’s effects on the book world are already emerging. It is a period of extreme financial hardship and unprecedented innovation. | Financial Times
• “I take a deep breath and email with my publicist about which bookstores are open to doing something virtual.” Anna Solomon on releasing a book during the pandemic. | Los Angeles Times
• On the poetic lessons of letter-writing in quarantine. | Kenyon Review

Also on Lit Hub: 150+ books recommended by the university press community • Stephan Haff on storytelling, bravery, and teaching Don Quixote to kids • Read an excerpt from Andrés Neuman’s novel Fracture, trans. by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia.

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