Footnotes, April 2020: Book links from around the web

At The Reading List, we’re trainspotters when it comes to interesting book links, and here are a number that caught our eye.

First, quarantine reading. The Johannesburg Review of Books is publishing ‘the best of The JRB‘ each day of lockdown. Short stories, essays, reviews, poetry from its three-year archive – this you don’t want to miss.
Second, quarantine reading. Last weekend, the Sunday Times Lifestyle team published short stories from a range of authors on “life in lockdown”: read Mark Winkler, Paige Nick, Ekow Duker, Karina M Szczurek, Ken Barris, Fred Khumalo, Fiona Melrose and Nozizwe Cynthia Jele.
Third, quarantine viewing. If you missed the AfroLit Sans Frontieres virtual literary festival on Instagram, you can partially relive it on YouTube. It’s fab.
Fourth, quarantine publishing. Who better to turn to than Melinda Ferguson for this? Conspiring with Pumla Dineo Gqola, she’s shortly to come out with LOCKDOWN: The Corona Chronicles, featuring seventeen of SA’s best. You gotta love it.
Fifth, social distancing regency book jacket style.
Sixth, quarantine publishing redux, courtesy these wonderful Native American public health posters from Red Planet Books.
Seventh, quarantine good night stories with … with … with … DOLLY PARTON THE BOOK LADY. She literally reads you good night stories on her channels (Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook). Watch her read The Little Engine That Could right here, right now, for heaven’s sake.
Eighth, quarantine sympathy from Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, in the form of a letter to the UK from the vantage of a couple of weeks in the latter’s future (eg, because coronavirus took hold in Italy first). It’s lovely.
Ninth, quarantine writing. Scottish author Peter May had a manuscript about lockdown in the UK rejected fifteen years ago – simply unrealisitc, the publishers told him. He put it aside – he even forgot he wrote it. Now, it has every chance of becoming the first pandemic blockbuster.
Here’s your one non-quarantine lit link for this episode of Footnotes: Lena Dunham is publishing a serial novel, Verified Strangers, for Vogue. You can help her choose the plot.
Finally, because we’re all exhausted and need to just need to zone out for a bit, here’s some aliens from Las Vegas rapping quarantine tips. “Social distance doesn’t have to be alienating,” after all.