In my email this morning, I asked you to think a bit about the current circumstances we face — the pandemic created by the novel coronavirus, the social isolation being imposed on our society and throughout much of the world, and the myriad ways in which our lives have been abruptly interrupted and altered — and its relation to the topic of this class: the varieties of the fantastic as they appear in works of fiction. The website LitHub, which aggregates literature articles from other websites and also produces content of its own, has gathered together various articles about the coronavirus. You can find that page here.
For example, this page links to this:
Le Monde is reporting that sales of Albert Camus’s 1947 classic, The Plague, have sky-rocketed in Italy, which continues to be the European nation most severely affected by the coronavirus outbreak: according to reported sale numbers in La Repubblica, the book jumped in ranking from 71st to 3rd at online sales portal IBN.it. Jose Saramago’s Blindness (which is about an epidemic of… blindness) is also flying off the shelves.
The plague novel most referenced in this part of the world (by which I mean the literary nether-corridors of America, aka literary twitter) is Ling Ma’s Severance, which tells the story of world-wide pandemic originating in China. According to Book Marks data, readers searched for Severance 50 percent more this week than last… (Maybe the only good thing about quarantine is the opportunity to catch up on reading?)
(Via Le Monde)
There is also a link to a translation of excerpts from writer Deng Anqing’s daily chronicles from a rural Chinese village and links to articles about the effect of the virus on bookstores and the broader literary community. Additional articles will no doubt continue to appear.