Lit Hub Daily: May 12, 2020

• “Ongoing environmental devastation has brought about renewed interest in the fungal world, and radical mycological possibilities abound.” Merlin Sheldrake in conversation with Robert Macfarlane. | Lit Hub Science
• “What occurs to me, as I sit down to write, is that this is the time to stand up for language.” Lydia Millet on the necessity of defending the truth against propaganda. | Lit Hub Politics
• Amanda Craig on why children’s books make good companions in a crisis. | Lit Hub
• Celebrating a pandemic birthday: Little City Books checks in five years after opening in Hoboken. | Lit Hub
• “I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen. / When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn’t often.” Poetry by Joseph Brodsky. | Lit Hub
• ON THE VBC: On Personal Space, Maggie Downs discusses braiding together narratives of grief and travel. | Lit Hub
• To celebrate the 95th publication anniversary of Mrs. Dalloway, here are the first reviews of every Virginia Woolf novel. | Book Marks
• Tracy O’Neill on the domestic lives of those who spy. | CrimeReads
• Here are 20 new books coming to (virtual) bookstores near you today. | The Hub
• Pulitzer Prize administrator Dana Canedy discusses un-sensationalizing diversity. | Vogue
• How communities are helping reach kids without access to books at home. | School Library Journal
• Remember the 1990s, when some teachers feared book series like Goosebumps and Nancy Drew would turn kids off of more canonical literature? | JSTOR
• Feeling burned out lately? These books show that you’re not alone. | The Guardian
• On Joseph Brodsky’s writing in exile, which “took his twin themes of travel and time and fused them: the past is a place to which you cannot return; the future is a place of infinite emptiness.” | New York Review of Books
• In the 1920s, the NYC-based “Algonquin Round Table” group of writers set the bar high for cliquey literary viciousness. | Biography
• “Haunted house stories describe spirits in limbo, that unsettled horror space between life and death.” Elizabeth Thomas on the Gothic elements of the pandemic. | Refinery29

Also on Lit Hub: On the school that optimizes golf performance • Rediscovering Lou Gehrig’s lost memoir • Read an excerpt from Hao Jingfang’s newly-translated novel Vagabonds, trans. by Ken Liu.