Lit Hub Daily: March 17, 2020

• THESE TIMES: How to support your local bookstores during the coronavirus pandemic · What China’s literary community is reading during the pandemic · The first lines of 10 classic novels rewritten for social distancing · Can’t decide what to read? Tell us your favorites and we’ll recommend a book. | Lit Hub
• “I regard such things as premature impertinences.” How J.R.R. Tolkien blocked fanboy W.H. Auden from writing a book about him. | Lit Hub
• “How is a poem like a crossword puzzle? feels like the start to a bad joke.” Adrienne Raphel explores the poet’s love of crosswords. | Lit Hub
• Great American radical: Talking to John Loughery on the life and legacy of Dorothy Day. | Lit Hub History
• “The exemplary working-class America I experienced in my grandparents’ trailer doesn’t exist anymore.” Eduardo Porter on an American fantasy. | Lit Hub Politics
• Phantom tumors, real appendicitis, and WebMD: Sue William Silverman on dealing with hypochondria. | Lit Hub Science
• What can six-toed cats teach us about genetic development? | Lit Hub Science
• Robert Stone in Saigon,1970: Madison Smartt Bell takes us inside the metamorphosis of Dog Soldiers. | CrimeReads
• Deceit and Other Possibilities author Vanessa Hua recommends five books that tell the immigrant story, from The Buddha in the Attic to Severance. | Book Marks
• “The impulse was similar to the one I have after finishing a textually dense but plot-driven novel: now that I knew how it all turned out, I wanted to go back to pick up the dropped clues I’d missed the first time around.” Miranda Popkey, Jessica apologist, on the unique experience of watching Love is Blind. | The New Yorker
• Take a look at the radiant, formerly lost 15th century illuminated manuscript of Divan of Hafez. | Hyperallergic
• “Think Dickinson’s poems are elliptical, or disjointed? The times themselves were out of joint.” How Emily Dickinson wrestled with Darwinism. | JSTOR
• What can “pandemic literature” teach us about racism, xenophobia, and ableism? | The Conversation
• David Lagercrantz, the author who took over writing the Millennium series after the death of Stieg Larsson, is turning to a new detective series of his own, compared to a “modern Sherlock Holmes saga.” | The Bookseller
• Independent bookstores in the UK are innovating ways to get literature to those in quarantine or isolation. | The Guardian
• On coronavirus, quarantine, and the literature of isolation. | The Paris Review

Also on Lit Hub: Sure, plot is good, but have you tried talking about story shape? (Joe Scapellato recommends it) • What China’s literary community is reading during the coronavirus pandemic • Read a story from Maria Reva’s collection Good Citizens Need Not Fear.