Lit Hub Weekly: March 23 - 27, 2020

• THESE TIMES: So, do you really want to help bookstores? • “March the Ninth Twenty Twenty,” a poem from Italian quarantine • Actors online are reading sonnets to soothe our anxieties • Distract yourself (or your homeschooling 8-year-old) with these hyper-close-up portraits of ordinary bugs • Francesca Marciano on the new silences filling the streets of Rome • Want to help a bookstore? Buy a gift card • And don’t forget bookstore workers! • Diane Seuss is not yet ready to die, economy be damned • How to spend 42 days alone in a a room • Lynne Tillman, for a moment, goes outside • Aminatta Forna diverges from the homeschool lesson plan with Chinua Achebe • Will virtual book events lead to virtual sales? • Bill Hayes heads downtown to buy a book, just before the stores close • Suzanne Rivecca on finally finding literary community • Liesl Schillinger on the unacknowledged hero who discovered that handwashing saves lives • More personal quarantine book recommendations for your reading pleasure • Patrick Stewart reads you a sonnet. | Lit Hub, Life in a Pandemic
• “My Dark Vanessa is a minefield in which language itself has been weaponized.” 5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
  
• Cheryl A. Head looks at the evolution of private eyes in fiction. | CrimeReads
• “In some ways, with Covid-19, we are as vulnerable as the Victorians were.” Amy Davidson Sorkin on Bleak House, Jane Eyre, and social distancing. | The New Yorker
• “Most of us are perennially short of time, and now we’re left hanging in it.” Olivia Laing on the loneliness of our current reality. | The New York Times
• “Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute.” Jill Lepore on our literature of contagion (and the antidote that is reading itself). | The New Yorker
• Get lost in a brief history of word games, from Sator Squares to anti-riddles. | The Paris Review
• “Memorizing is an act of will and of the imagination. I felt my brain shifting as if it was physically creating a place to gather the lines into a disorganized sock drawer.” Maybe now’s the time to memorize some sonnets? | The Smart Set
• From survivalist stories to tales of solo expeditions, these books composed in isolation may have some lessons for our present state of quarantine. | The Washington Post
• If you have some extra time on your hands, why not use it to help librarians and archivists with their “digital detective work”? | Atlas Obscura
• Stuck inside with kids? Here are some audiobooks that families can listen to together. | The Washington Post
• The impact of closing public libraries goes way beyond books—especially in communities where people rely on them for shelter and safety. | WIRED
• While you’re staying out of the mosh pit, read one of the 50 greatest rock memoirs of all time. | Rolling Stone
• Consider yourself lucky not to be isolating with W.H. Auden, incorrigibly messy roommate. | The Paris Review
• Hemingway once spent a summer quarantined with his sick toddler, his wife, and his mistress—but don’t worry, “he actually took quite nicely to it.” | Town and Country
• On Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the seminal novel of the 1918 flu pandemic. | Texas Monthly
• “We need stories, and we will have them.” Joyce Carol Oates on reading, writing, and literary community in the current moment. | WSJ
• “The pamphlets are a breeding ground for debates and tests of emerging concepts of companionate marriage and female independence.” How stories of “fiendish females” challenged Victorian ideals. | JSTOR

Also on Lit Hub:

HBO’s The Plot Against America betrays Philip Roth—and that’s a good thing • Babe Ruth and the moment that changed baseball forever • Fran Bigman profiles Joanna Kavenna • Carl Rollyson on uncovering the hidden love lives of Sylvia Plath and William Faulkner • Kristine Ong Muslim on personal and environmental grief • So, is daydreaming good for us? • Katy Simpson Smith on viewing Blackness through the lives of the Medici • Sinéad Gleeson in praise of the non-linear form • How young William Faulkner’s time in the French Quarter influenced his still-developing writing style • Cameron Esposito recommends books for a queer road trip • On the rarity of a solitary tree • Can feminist manifestoes of the past wake us up today? • Sommelier Victoria James on serving a $650 dollar bottle of wine to a racist idiot • Tishani Doshi on seclusion and life along the coast • Cai Emmons recommends nine thoroughly unabashed books about bodies • The story of one Utah county’s decades-long struggle for the Native American vote • Abbie Greaves on the merits of silence • Bettye Kearse on the complicated lineage of her ancestors, and “the founding father of [her] African-American family,” James Madison • Bob Odenkirk came “within an inch” of playing Michael Scott on The Office • 12 great writers on 12 great birds (from Whitman to Thoreau to Muir and more) • How the myth of alien abduction was born • Treat yourself to a deleted scene from Get Out • Idanna Pucci on Rebecca Salomé Foster, the woman who fought for Sing Sing’s early incarcerated women • On taking inspiration from famous authors’ creative processes

Best of Book Marks:

New on CrimeReads:

J. Kingston Pierce on the history and crime fiction of Seattle •  T. Marie Vandelly on the murder that still haunts her • Molly Odintz recommends 14 enormous crime novels to fill your days  • Victoria Helen Stone with a guide for the audio book reluctant • Andrea Bartz on social media fakeness and thriller writers • Rachel Harrison on women who have mastered short, dreadful fiction • Jessica Moor makes the case for writing about domestic violence • Olivia Rutigliano on English village murder mysteries to binge now • Christi Daughtery explains why journalists turn to crime fiction