Some real literary figures feature in Dayswork, a novel by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel (who are married to each other). Namely, Herman Melville, but also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Lowell, literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, and the still-living and Pulitzer-winning Melville biographer Hershel Parker (thinly veiled as “The Biographer”). They aren’t characters, exactly, as they play the historical figures that they actually are only through the lens of the protagonist’s internet deep dive as she becomes obsessed with Melville during the early days of the pandemic — that time when we were all sequestered inside with our computers as our only tethers to the outside world.