The cultural critic Susan Sontag’s classic Illness as Metaphor emerged from her rage at seeing, after her own cancer diagnosis, “how much the very reputation of this illness added to the suffering of those who have it.” In 1978, Sontag contended with cancer’s reputation as scourge, invader, predator, demonic pregnancy, demonic enemy, barbarian within. Cancer’s roots were then imagined, at least in part, as psychological, resulting from repressed emotion. These metaphoric conceptions of cancer saddled its sufferers with shame and prevented many from seeking proper treatment or even knowing their diagnosis. A decade later, in AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag

Reading at home can’t replace the sense of community and connection offered at your local bookstore, but virtual book clubs, talks, and classes may help fill the void. Independent booksellers and publishers across the US are moving their scheduled spring programming online and some are launching entirely new web series for your quarantine-viewing pleasure. Attending these won’t be the same as meeting in person, but it’ll come close.

Please don’t bury me Down in that cold, cold ground No, I’d rather have ’em cut me up And pass me all around —John Prine, “Please Don’t Bury Me” Fearful indeed the suspicion—but more fearful the doom! It may be asserted, without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death. —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial” There could be unexpected chiming or clanging. —Lorrie Moore, “Author’s Note” to Collected Stories IF THE STRANGEST THING ABOUT LORRIE MOORE’S COLLECTED STORIES is that it didn’t exist

WHENEVER I SEE A COPY OF A ROBERT STONE NOVEL in a used-book store, I buy it, pretty much to introduce him to others, to press his work upon others. I recently acquired a copy of A Flag for Sunrise, one of his masterworks—1981 first edition. Out of print. Nine dollars. Between its pages, a folded note. Black ink. Neat handwriting. Life is hard. We’re trying to prepare you for that. Make mistakes . . . fine . . . good. But make them because you don’t know. Learn from them. Do not make them b/c your friends are making

Katie Roiphe is someone who, by her own account, writes prose as if heading into combat: She describes her preferred authorial voice as “a vehicle, a tank.” But a while back she began to feel something lacking. “My usual ways of being in the world were no longer working,” she writes at the beginning of her new memoir, The Power Notebooks. “My theories and interpretations were wrong or inadequate.” She was used to building arguments and taking stands, but she wanted to try something different—something looser, more fragmentary, more vulnerable. She began keeping a notebook where she collected thoughts on

A man is what he eats. So wrote the nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, and such is the premise underlying Ben Katchor’s monumental illustrated book The Dairy Restaurant.

Where most autotheory centers the life of the mind, Harry Dodge’s new memoir goes a step further, taking the mind as its matter and, to some extent, its form. The book is a brain! A peripheral brain that wonders about machine intelligence, consciousness, and itself. My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing sifts through a relentless stream of inputs, nestling experiences and ideas to discover what might magnetize what. Roaring with thinking, the text might like to rise up and reassemble itself into animate form.

Two portraits of Félix Fénéon bookend his wide-ranging life and deeds. One, a highly stylized canvas by Paul Signac (1890) of the man as art critic, shows a “decorative Félix,” in gangly, goateed profile, proffering a lily against a background of swirling psychedelic colors. The other, a mug shot taken four years later, captures him as a prime suspect in a restaurant bombing. These twin personas, the aesthete and the activist, conspired to produce one of the truly unusual personalities of the French fin de siècle.

You can tell a lot about someone by peering at their bookshelf. “I don’t like to read,” the Taiwanese writer Sanmao grumbles when she receives booklets of traffic rules before a driving test. “What are you talking about?” her husband, José, says, gesturing at her bookcase. “Here you have books on astronomy, geography, demons and ghouls, spy romances, animals, philosophy, gardening, languages, cooking, manga, cinema, tailoring, even secret recipes in traditional Chinese medicine, magic tricks, hypnotism, dyeing clothes.” This scene, from Stories of the Sahara, a collection of short travelogues set mainly in the African desert, is Sanmao distilled: a