What helps us to endure amidst the pain and suffering and panic? I’m not sure. I’m sure it’s different for everyone. But maybe writing, for me, is a kind of prayer. Maybe art is a kind of prayer. Maybe walking. Maybe breathing. Maybe caring about something sacred to you, no matter how silly it seems to other people, is a kind of prayer. Or maybe I’m elevating something I love to give me an excuse to keep doing it.

These verbal capsules contain universes—seemingly ordinary worlds that transform, as a matter of course, in unexpected and mysterious ways. A woman gets a stomachache and lays an egg. A man gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a seahorse and floats out to sea. I’m finding them to be perfect reading for a pandemic.

Everyone thinks they know what love is, but most have no clue. Reading hooks' works on love, you’ll likely discover, for the most part, that nobody loves you. Not your family, not your friends, not your “lover.” You also might discover that you don’t love anyone either.

It is difficult to track the speaker of Shimoda’s poems, as his work permeates the delineation between self and other. With this untethering, Shimoda creates a body of text and formal space that unites human and nonhuman aspects of the desert, embodying it as something internal.

Here are some of the books that have kept me occupied in isolation, and have helped me forget about this mess we’re in, by immersing my imagination in even bigger, scarier messes.

For Mary South, nurturing is just another way for people to connect, an effort her characters rarely accomplish. These stories focus so intently on the space between people that one could forget anyone ever succeeds in uniting.