Lit Hub Daily: May 20, 2020

• “For such an anti-intellectual, Malaparte is extraordinarily intelligent.” Edmund White on reading Curzio Malaparte, eccentric, writer, liar, fascist. | Lit Hub
• Great plagues always hit workers the hardest: on Daniel Defoe’s fictional account of the London plague. | Lit Hub History
• Curtis Sittenfeld loves literary gossip, folk music, and the dream of being “magnificently organized.” | Lit Hub
• Meet the great Mabel Stark, a true tiger queen ahead of her time. | Lit Hub
• Death of a radical rewilder: Joanna Pocock on the life and times of Finisia Medrano, 1956-2020. | Lit Hub Nature
• While the literature of after can feel instructional, pre-apocalyptic fiction shows us what to appreciate before it’s gone. | Lit Hub
• ON THE VBC: Emily Neuberger and Garrard Conley talk Hamilton, racism, and coming to terms with your gifts, on Rekindled. | Lit Hub
• 80+ crime novels, mysteries, thrillers, and true crime books for the long summer days and nights ahead. | CrimeReads
• Wuthering Heights, The Tempest, Wild, and more rapid-fire book recs from Rough Magic author Lara Prior-Palmer. | Book Marks
• “Is language a metaphoric virus or a metaphoric antibody?” Joshua Cohen on virality, prophecy, and language. | Bookforum
• From an Italian seaside villa to the Adirondacks, Nell Painter reflects on friends, drawing, whiteness and invasions in a time of sudden change. | MacDowell Colony
• In a spotlight on the art world, Morgan Library & Museum director Colin Bailey talks working from home and studying the earliest literary collections of J.P. Morgan. | Artnet
• Authorities announced the forfeiture of a tablet inscribed with the Epic of Gilgamesh from the Hobby Lobby-owned Museum of the Bible, after the tablet was determined to have been illegally smuggled out of Iraq. | NBC News
• Thatcher Wine, AKA Gwyneth Paltrow’s book curator, has some opinions about all the celebrity bookshelves we’re seeing on Zoom. | Town & Country
• “This is about finding the language that is worthy of the things we have seen in life.” Inside a creative writing group for essential workers. | The Baffler
• Home brewing, gardening, canning: In the wake of the pandemic, how-to books are enjoying a surge in popularity. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub: The only successful coup in the US began as a campaign to curb black voting rights • Mekkiayah Jacobs: New York City needs to care for its homeless • Read an excerpt from Anna Dorn’s new novel Vagablonde.