Lit Hub Daily: May 19, 2020

• Even in retirement, Philip Roth wrote thousands of pages: Benjamin Taylor on stoicism and scandal in the life of a literary icon. | Lit Hub
• “It is the job of the poet to bring forth the heart’s most difficult truths, and for me, Millay did exactly that.” Olivia Gatwood on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s strength and progressivism. | Lit Hub
• “My sense of unease while watching Mrs. America makes me think about inclusion versus exclusion.” Veronica Esposito on watching Mrs. America as a trans woman. | Lit Hub TV
• S.D. Chrostowska looks at the intersection of dreamlife and reality amid the pandemic. | Lit Hub
• Even when they hate it, why can’t Americans seem to stop using Amazon? | Lit Hub
• “What would literary history look like if there were no alternatives to mainstream publishing?” Maggie Doherty on the creative communities that changed literature. | Lit Hub
• ON THE VBC: David Means and Candace Bushnell talk solitude and sociability, on Fiction/Non/Fiction Live. | Lit Hub
• Running low on reading material? Here are 20 new books coming out this week. | The Hub
• Fire in Paradise authors Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano recommend five books that offer a master class is reported nonfiction, from Matthew Desmond’s Evicted to Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial. | Book Marks
• A month of literary listening: AudioFile’s best audiobooks of May. | Book Marks
• Harriet Walker on isolation thrillers, maternity leave, and the strange familiarity of quarantine. | CrimeReads
• Autobiographies, medical histories philosophy, poetry, reportage: the race to publish books about the pandemic began earlier than you might think. | The New York Times
• “We, the readers, are just going along for the ride. What a concept—to abdicate control. Ambiguity holds power. Nothing is certain and everything is in flux.” Sophie Mackintosh on the transformative properties of Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar. | The Guardian
• Historians respond to the question: How will we tell the story of the coronavirus pandemic? | Los Angeles Review of Books
• Sometimes the collapse sneaks up on you—like in these eerie slow apocalypse books. | Mel Magazine
• Rants about bad grammar don’t accomplish much—other than spreading the false idea that there’s one “proper” way to speak English. | JSTOR Daily
• Shakespeare’s Globe theater is in danger of closing permanently due to the coronavirus. | Variety
• “Thank goodness we have books like Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs, a reminder that true literature does not avert its eyes from anything difficult.” Yiyun Li offers a reading recommendation for the strong of heart. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: The enduring impact of jazz on American film • Even in retirement, Philip Roth wrote thousands of pages (sorry) • Read an excerpt from Anne Raeff’s new novel Only the River.