Lit Hub Daily: May 22, 2020

• You’ve (almost) made it through another indistinguishable week! Why not celebrate with round nine of our personalized quarantine book recommendations? | Lit Hub
• “How painful it is to think that the world might crumble.” Claire Messud on her family’s WWII correspondence. | Lit Hub History
• Ridiculously rich people: they’re not just like us! (And other lessons sociologist Ashley Mears learned from partying with the wealthy). | Lit Hub Politics
• “What does a writer do with her suspicion of historical records intentionally obfuscating the contributions of certain characters?” Lauren Francis-Sharma on researching historical fiction as a writer of color. | Lit Hub History
• With the Olympics canceled, there’s plenty of extra time (sigh) to read up on heroic moments in sports. Elise Hooper has you covered, from the pool to the rink. | Lit Hub Sports
• “Love, Under a Falling Sky.” A poem by Megan Pinto. | Lit Hub
• ON THE VBC: Stephanie Danler on addiction and boundaries, on Personal Space · On Sheltering, Lydia Millet discusses writing climate change in fiction, and the elusive concept of hope · Clinton sex, Shakespeare, and dogs in bow-ties, on The Week in Books LIVE. | Lit Hub
• Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham, Ivy Pochoda’s These Girls, and Jonathan Bate’s Radical Wordsworth all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. | Book Marks
• “Compassion, that supreme quality in a fiction writer, is a main source of Greenwell’s power.” Sigrid Nunez on Garth Greenwell’s beloved bibliography. | NYRB
• As Los Angeles bookstores begin a partial reopening, booksellers are facing concerns about safety. | Los Angeles Times
• Zyzzyva, the “crown-jewel literary journal” of San Francisco, turns 35 this spring. | SF Weekly
• If your quarantine is a little too calm, why not get your kid into Steven King? | Lifehacker
• “In this season of unimaginable death, especially black and brown death, these young people rose to the occasion.” On teaching African American literature during COVID-19. | Boston Review
• An epidemiologist makes a case for integrating the humanities in discussions of public health. | Inside Higher Ed
• How have Neo-Nazis weaponized the work of J.R.R. Tolkien for their purposes? | VICE

Also on Lit Hub: How the Black press battled military discrimination and won • To the child I will never have: Jean-Baptiste del Amo writes a letter to the future • Read an excerpt from Natalia Borges Polesso’s newly-translated collection Amora: Stories, trans. by Julia Sanches.