Lit Hub Daily: May 14, 2020

• “I hadn’t meant to, the idea was just there. A drawing a day. Why not? How many drawings will there be? God knows.” Edward Carey on how he’s been passing the time. | Lit Hub
• Reckoning with the career of Isaac Asimov, sci-fi giant and serial sexual harasser. | Lit Hub
• “Up to the 1920s, I suppose, even up to the 30s, Russia enjoyed some semblance of parity with the West.” Joseph Brodsky on glimpsing the jazz, jeans, and movie stars of America. | Lit Hub
• From Samanta Schweblin to Selja Ahava, Maria Reva recommends surreal books for surreal times. | Lit Hub
• “I cast a spell that lets us lift the veil from the notion that this country was ever paradise.” Felicia Zamora on the dreams of Latinx women in a pandemic year. | Lit Hub Politics
• “No one gets off the hook in my poems.” Tommye Blount in conversation with Peter Mishler. | Lit Hub
• “Something like my own obituary…” Albert Einstein puzzles through the complexities of skepticism, reason, and truth. | Lit Hub Science
• ON THE VBC: Anna Solomon talks about the impacts of inequality on women, on Sheltering. | Lit Hub
• Olivia Rutigliano rounds up the 50 most iconic detective/sidekick duos in history. | CrimeReads
• Laura Miller on Curtis Sittenfeld’s alternate Hillary, Jo Livingstone on the life and legacy of Odetta, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
• On the outdated pleasures of Michael Almereyda’s “modern” Hamlet, 20 years later: “[T]he way Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet just staggers around an airplane unchecked, the respect given to USA Today, and, of course, those JNCOs.” | Crooked Marquee
• Stéphane Bourgoin, who sold millions of books claiming to be an expert on serial killers, has come under fire for fabricating details of his life. | The Guardian
• Three new books on abortion describe a landscape that is still hostile to many women and make the case for reproductive justice. | Washington Post
• “Saunders’s characters are beaten down by mind-numbing entertainment, uncaring bosses and broken healthcare systems, yet they still care about each other.” What George Saunders got right about 2020. | Inside Hook
• What does the Imperial War Museum’s Wartime Classics series, which features novels by authors who experienced WWII firsthand, say about representations of global conflict? | New Statesman
• How is “herd immunity” linked to the violence of social Darwinism? Take in Judith Butler’s lessons on nonviolence. | The Nation
• A case of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as “the dream-poem of right now.” | The Atlantic

Also on Lit Hub: How elephant matriarchs gain power as they age • Jim Newton on Didion, the Dead, and the dawn of a California arts revolution • Read an excerpt from Ava Homa’s novel Daughters of Smoke and Fire.