A Diary Of The Plague Year

An extraordinary illustrated chronicle of 2020 that captures this indelible year in America in all its tragic, surreal, epic, and (sometimes) comedic intensity Artist Elise Engler set herself a task five years ago: to illustrate the first headline she heard on her bedside radio every morning. The idea was to create a pictorial record of one year of listening to the news. But when Donald Trump was elected, the headlines turned too wild for her to stop the experiment. Then 2020 happened. Was there ever such a year? Headlines about the death of Kobe Bryant and Donald Trump's impeachment began to give way to news of a mysterious virus in China, and Engler’s pages were quickly filled with the march of COVID-19: schools closing their doors, hospitals overflowing, graveyards full to capacity. Day by day, Engler drew every shocking turn of the year: the police murder of George Floyd and protests around the globe; a war against science and those who preached it; fires consuming California; a vicious election, absurdly contested. Other stories appeared, too: “Harvey Weinstein Sentenced,” “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospitalized,” “China Extends Control over Hong Kong,” and—on repeat—“Stock Market Plunges.” The result is a powerful visual record of an unprecedented time, collected in A Diary of the Plague Year, which follows the headlines from the first appearance of the coronavirus to the inauguration of President Joe Biden. Made in real time, Engler’s vibrant, immediate images recapture what it was like to live through 2020, bringing texture, feeling, and even charm to what we might not remember and what we will never forget.

Rumors that plague had entered Barcelona's poorest quarter started circulating shortly after the New Year of 1651, but local officials hesitated to impose a full quarantine on the city. Within months the number of sick in the pesthouse had swelled to 4,000, and thousands more had fled the city. By the time the plague abated in September, at least 15,000 Barcelonans had died. This book is a translation of the 1651 journal of Miquel Parets, a Barcelona tanner who set out, like the protagonist of Camus' The Plague, "to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence." His journal is rich with the details of life during the epidemic, including accounts of prisoners who escaped from jail by claiming they had the disease; of priests hearing confessions with a torch held between them and the sick to avoid contagion; and of people desperately seeking wetnurses for children after their mothers had died. Unlike other accounts, which depict local authorities as the bulwark of enlightened authority amid a sea of popular superstition, Parets accuses the local elite of negligence, selfishness, and abuse of authority during the contagion. His journal is notable both for its non-elite perspective and for its emotional quality--especially in the moving passage wherein the tanner recounts the death of his wife and three of their children. Amelang introduces the journal, illustrating the unique place of the work in the plague literature, and supplies notes and commentaries that clarify the historical context for the contemporary reader. Also included is a helpful appendix of excerpts from other popular plague texts.

Samuel Pepys gives a unique first hand account of life during the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London. Pepys stayed in London while many of the wealthy fled the city in the face of the plague. His careful observation and interest in the details of people's lives as well as the events of the time are unparalleled.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.

'Love is nothing without feeling. And feeling is still less without love.' Celebrated in its own day as the progenitor of 'a school of sentimental writers', A Sentimental Journey (1768) has outlasted its many imitators because of the humour and mischievous eroticism that inform Mr Yorick's travels. Setting out to journey to France and Italy he gets little further than Lyons but finds much to appreciate, in contrast to contemporary travel writers whom Sterne satirizes in the figures of Smelfungus and Mundungus. A master of ambiguity and double entendre, Sterne is nevertheless as concerned as his peers with exploring the nature of virtue; unlike other writers of sentimental fiction Sterne insists on the inseparability of desire and feeling. This new edition includes a selection from The Sermons of Mr Yorick, which shed light on the concerns of the Journey, The Journal to Eliza, which records Sterne's feelings as he languishes for the company of Eliza Draper, and A Political Romance, the satire on a local ecclesiastical squabble that was the catalyst for Sterne's literary career. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Expanded from a touring exhibition originated at Para Site in 2013, this book critically analyzes historical and contemporary imaginations and politics of fear in the face of disease and the specter of contamination in society and culture. Scholars, artists, novelists, and journalists depart from Hong Kong's history of epidemic--the most recent being the SARS outbreak of 2003, shortly followed by the tragic death of pan-Asian pop icon Leslie Cheung, and tackle the galvanizing power and the varied perceptions of contagion in the context of lingering histories, myths, anxieties, and memories across geographies. While composing a complex picture of the Hong Kong psyche, these contributions speak from a humanistic and global perspective, pointing to the intersections of urban environments and post-colonial psychology, popular culture and racism, public health and migration, national identity and art. Copublished with Para Site, Hong Kong Contributors Michael Berry, Natalia S. H. Chan, Cosmin Costinas, Dung Kai-cheung, Inti Guerrero, James T. Hong, Austin Ming-han Hsu, Zuni Icosahedron, Finnouala McHugh, Pak Sheung Chuen, Lawrence Pun, Shih Shu-ching, Xiaoyu Weng