Lit Hub Daily: March 18, 2020

• THESE TIMES: Igiaba Scego writes from Rome: “Dear Americans, please stay inside.” · Gerald Posner on the near-impossibility of planning for a viral pandemic · How to support your local bookstores. | Lit Hub Coronavirus Coverage
• “Before I moved back to the Midwest, I’d stopped seeing any good in where I came from, if I ever saw good.” TaraShea Nesbit reckons with home. | Lit Hub
• Why do doctors discredit women’s pain? On fibromyalgia and discovering you’re not the only one. | Lit Hub Health
• “She told me that in those years she was ‘feral.’” Alex Halberstadt on his grandmother’s life in the Soviet Union, midcentury. | Lit Hub History
• “It can enclose and protect, comfort and inspire, oppress and entrap.” Suzanne Redfearn recommends six novels where architecture is more than just a setting. | CrimeReads
• Sarah Neilson recommends 10 New Books About Womxn’s History for Womxn’s History Month. | Book Marks
• “Reading is one of Witherspoon’s superpowers.” Ann Patchett profiles Reese Witherspoon. | Vanity Fair
• A few of your favorite authors on books they might finally read in quarantine (for a lot of them, it’s Middlemarch.) | LA Times
• As college campuses close, students are organizing mutual aid networks to support each other. | Inside Higher Ed
• “We’re trying to think about the ways we can still be an inspiring space without the physical space.” Here’s how indie bookstores are handling coronavirus-related closures. | Vulture
• A fun fact for Women’s History Month: according to The NPD Group, female authors accounted for a significant majority of the top 100 literary fiction sales in 2019. | Yahoo Finance
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the agency that represents her have firmly denied author Anne Giwa-Amu’s claims that Adichie plagiarized her own novel Sade while writing Half of a Yellow Sun. | AllAfrica
• The Chinese embassy in Peru rebuked writer Mario Vargas Llosa for “spread[ing] irresponsible and prejudiced opinions” after he wrote that the coronavirus outbreak would have played out differently if “China was a free country and democratic rather than a dictatorship.” | Hong Kong Free Press

Also on Lit Hub: Have you ever noticed that Jane Austen’s characters tend to blur together? • Read an excerpt from Romesh Gunesekera’s new novel Suncatcher.