By Aaron Calvin

Reading Assignment is a new monthly series where online editor Aaron Calvin recommends essays and fiction from around the web. If you read something you think should be shared in this series, send it in an email to aaron.calvin@snhu.edu.

Kathryn Scanlan and Kate Zambreno in conversation (Granta)
Two luminaries come together to discuss life in quarantine, and “the works of art that make time feel as strange and deconstructed as it is now.” The discussion covers everything from the rain to Kathy Acker.

Camus’s Inoculation Against Hate by Laura Marris (The New York Times)
Albert Camus’ great work of fascist allegory, The Plague, finds a new audience in an age where concepts of disease and authoritarianism are bound together more than ever.

Ghost World by Rachel Ossip (N+1)
Ossip reflects on Duty Free Art, a new manifesto from the artist Hito Steyerl. The review investigates the timely questions around making art and the crisis of globalization explored in this text.

What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About by Jill Lepore (The New Yorker)
A survey of what the great works of fiction on plague and pestilence really say about the human imagination and the specter of death.

A Brief History of Supermarkets by Alan Hanson (Hazlitt)
This lyrics essay exploring the spacial poetics of grocery stores and memory comes at just the right time when a trip the supermarket is becoming a focal point for many.

Poem for April: “April Snow” by Matthew Zapruder

I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike
on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.