Lit Hub Daily: May 27, 2020

• “A century ago, where restaurants existed, they were crucial for feeding the many new citydwellers who lived in one-room studios or boarding houses.” Rebecca Spang on restaurant culture amid the 1918 pandemic. | Lit Hub History
• John Barth deserves a serious reassessment: John Domini rereads the author of The Sot-Weed Factor on his 90th birthday. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Keep the quarantine blues at bay with this week’s crop of new books. | Lit Hub
• ON THE VBC: Lucia LoTempio discusses moving forward after violence, on Playback. | Lit Hub
• “These days I know that the best method to find your way around Berlin is walking, because body and mind learn out of step.” Mariana Oliver on Emine Sevgi Özdamar. | Lit Hub
• Beloved, The Remains of the Day, The Master and Margarita, and more rapid-fire book recs from Téa Obreht. | Book Marks
• Five debut crime novels to enjoy this May. | CrimeReads
• In Japan, where bookstores juxtapose English instruction books and literature about the uniqueness of the Japanese language, the debate over learning English is incredibly divisive. | Foreign Policy
• Joyce Carol Oates has won the Cino del Duca, one of France’s most prestigious literary awards and among the world’s richest. | Economic Times
• “Writers are notoriously bad people, a truism pronounced most often by people who go out with writers and second most often by writers themselves.” Lauren Oyler on morality in contemporary fiction. | Bookforum
• Meredith Talusan on trans memoir and writing to a reader who is “an observer in my self-exploration.” | The Paris Review
• On rescuing Hollywood novelist Alfred Hayes from obscurity. | Los Angeles Times
  J.K. Rowling is publishing a new children’s book, The Ickabog, online. | J.K. Rowling
• “Being forced to stay at home in isolation might be the ultimate in so-called ‘inauthentic’ travel.” On travel writing in the absence of travel. | Guernica

Also on Lit Hub: Women who did what they wanted: A reading list • The story of urban resilience is a capitalist convenience: Mark Jay and Philip Conklin on the narrative around Detroit • Read an excerpt from Ilana Masad’s debut novel All My Mother’s Lovers.