Lit Hub Daily: May 21, 2020

• “What is this ‘economy’ that can live only by growing endlessly but a virus of the most dead-end sort, the kind that too hastily kills its host?” Ben Ehrenreich on radical change in a time of pandemic. | Lit Hub Politics
• Flannery O’Connor: genius or sadist? Let’s ask the one-star Amazon reviews! | Lit Hub
• Hear, hear! Emma Straub hereby abolishes all reading-related guilt.  | Lit Hub
• “Such is the opportunity in the current crisis: to transform disruptive emergency into structural change.” Hal Foster on what comes after Covid-19. | Lit Hub
• From Perón to Trump, revisionist histories have always been at the heart of fascist populism. | Lit Hub Politics
• Carter Sickel compiles a reading list of queer rural fiction, from Ocean Vuong to Dorothy Allison. | Lit Hub
• “Iran may be the only place where Barbie still captures young hearts and inflames adult minds.” Porochista Khakpour on loving—and destroying—an iconic doll. | Lit Hub
• ON THE VBC: On Joining Conversation, Katya Cengel leads a roundtable on Chernobyl · Maggie Doherty discusses the limitations of a room of one’s own, on Sheltering · Jordan Kisner and Anna Weiner in conversation, on Rekindled. | Lit Hub
• Laura Marsh on Curtis Sittenfeld’s imagined Hillary, Catherine Lacey on Kate Zambreno’s fantasy of a memoir, and more of the reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks
• Travel the world from the safety of your couch with these 6 international crime novels out this month. | CrimeReads
• “Do I want an emollient cream, a tightening gel, or perhaps a serum that promises everything at once?”: Daphne Merkin on women wearing make-up during lockdown. | New York Review of Books
• “I have to say, really and truly, everything I know about writing about sex I learned from Judy Blume.” Curtis Sittenfeld and the Judy Blume talk the Clintons, bad reviews, and (of course) sex scenes. | Interview
• With its ambiguity, strangeness, and speed, Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas anticipated some characteristics of the modern novel. | The New Yorker
• “An inherently private act — sounds that we hear in our own heads — binds us together.” Gal Beckerman on virtual book gatherings and the social dynamics of reading. | The New York Times
• An organized effort to send books to schools and libraries in Zimbabwe has mobilized to share public health information during the pandemic. | Christian Science Monitor
• Finally: how to find a book when you don’t know the title. | BoingBoing
• Emily St. John Mandel opens up about the success of Station Eleven, privilege, and why she really couldn’t care less what Bernie Madoff thinks of her latest novel. | Rain Taxi

Also on Lit Hub: Mara Faye Lethem speaks to Patricio Pron about his novel of Italian Futurism • The case of Oscar Wilde’s mistaken identity in Naples • Read an excerpt from Shubhangi Swarup’s debut novel Latitudes of Longing.