Lit Hub Daily: April 7, 2020

• THESE TIMES: Emily Temple wonders what the novel will look like in a post-pandemic world · Victoria James talks to Maris Kreizman on Sheltering · Libro.fm is hiring booksellers effected by coronavirus closings. | Life in a Pandemic
• A feminist critique of Murakami novels, with Mieko Kawakami, and… Murakami himself. | Lit Hub
• “Extraordinarily written books containing trauma necessarily demand young people to see a world beyond their own scope of experiences.” Sahar Mustafah makes the case for teaching “depressing” books. | Lit Hub
• “People who work for libraries are not interested in insisting on a system that isn’t reaching anyone.” Sara Martin falls in love with libraries, again and again. | Lit Hub
• Ta-Nehisi Coates on the privilege of knowing the late, great David Carr. | Lit Hub
• Chris Lamb recalls some of the best political putdowns even captured on video. | Lit Hub Politics
• “In times of crisis, we are much more tempted to make observations about national characters.” Marie Mutsuki Mockett on the cultural lessons of two chaotic imaginary cats. | Lit Hub
• Megan Campisi celebrates the strange, sordid world of Elizabethan true crime. | CrimeReads
• The Ancestor author Danielle Trussoni recommends five books about family secrets, from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca to Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance. | Book Marks
• Ben Lerner, Karen Russell, Edwidge Danticat, Maggie Nelson, Lorrie Moore, Donald Antrim and more publish short dispatches from the pandemic. | The New Yorker
• Reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with children, Merve Emre writes, is a perfect task for concentrating at home. | The Point
• Is now the perfect time to read Moby-Dick? | Inside Hook
• “The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years.” Arundhati Roy on the coronavirus in India. | Financial Times
• The first book of the New York Public Library’s new virtual book club will be James McBride’s Deacon King Kong. | Time Out
• The literature of plagues reveals human precariousness and unexpected beauty, writes Gabrielle Bellot. | Catapult
• “For now, it’s not enough that a book has to be good. A book also has to be right.” On contemporary literature and social justice. | The Smart Set

Also on Lit Hub: How having a writing community stimulates creativity • Finding permission to fail in A Confederacy of Dunces • Read an excerpt from Julia Alvarez’s new novel Afterlife.