Lit Hub Daily: May 11, 2020

• Because not everyone has extra time during quarantine, here are the 50 best contemporary novels under 200 pages. | Lit Hub
• “Maybe it’s trite to say, but you don’t feel freedom intensely unless you don’t have it.” Lydia Millet talks to Kristen Iversen about end times, smug liberals, and good teens. | Lit Hub
• Leslie Stein illustrates a day at the Portland Book Festival (circa Before). | Lit Hub
• “communication ≠ connection”: A poem by Jenny Zhang from the collection My Baby First Birthday. | Lit Hub
• “The worst thing that can happen to a book is for it to sound obsolete, to be read only with archeological curiosity.” Katie Whittemore interviews Sara Mesa. | Lit Hub
• How will restaurants reinvent themselves post-lockdown? Critic and restaurant historian William Sitwell looks forward. | Lit Hub
• “First and foremost, he was always concerned with psychotherapy, both for the individual patient and at a collective level.” On the unlikely optimism of Viktor Frankl. | Lit Hub
• James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and more rapid-fire book recs from Quotients author Tracy O’Neill. | Book Marks
• What makes a book more thriller than sci-fi? S.L. Huang examines the porous boundary between two closely linked genres. | CrimeReads
• Using Joseph Campbell’s work on myths, Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Wife,” and Mrs. Robinson herself, Eliott Grover traces a literary history of MILFs. | Inside Hook
• “Ben Taub is not the problem, of course. It’s just that the edifices of elite journalism consistently elevate the voices of those like him.” On the problem with the Pulitzer Prizes. | The Baffler
• “This is a terrifying moment, but it’s also a chance to choose the kind of world we want to live in, and then to make it happen.” Olivia Liang on trauma, art, and life in a pandemic. | BOMB
• In celebration of his Pulitzer win, Jericho Brown is “going to focus on the opportunities available to me, like introspection and meditation.” | Emory Wheel
• An Oakland bar has a deal worthy of the coronavirus era: Get a cocktail and a book to go. | San Francisco Chronicle
• “Our culture is drowning in explicitness– thanks to the internet. And yet we suffer from a dearth of representations of embodiedness, by which I mean bodies imbued with consciousness.” Garth Greenwell on (good) writing about sex. | The Guardian
• The Shakespeare and Company Project, led by a team at Princeton University, gives an unprecedented look at the reading habits of some of the 20th century’s greatest writers and artists. | The Hub

Also on Lit Hub: “Blues: Odysseus”: A poem by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers from the collection The Age of Phillis • How an exploitative railroad industry created J.P. Morgan’s fortune •Read from Julianne Pachico’s debut novel The Anthill.