An outgrowth of a four-year study by Paillard and his research team, this volume describes the societal impact of a full-force epidemic on a large, diversified Mediterranean seaport city. In addition to his straightforward, empirical reports presented elsewhere, the author has here chosen to present a reflexive, qualitative study in narrative form, portraying the sociologist as participant-observer, and providing the reader with a pioneering study on problem formation and moral panic. For this first English edition, Paillard has added an appendix on methodology.

The Plague Years collects scholarly and essayistic reflections on literary, visual, and sonic representations of the COVID-19 and other pandemics. These are placed alongside poetry and short fiction written in the first two years of quarantine or isolation. This range expresses the intellectual and imaginative struggle and ingenuity entailed in coming to terms with the rampant spread of disease and its emotional, cultural, and political consequences. The contributions are from diverse contexts: Africa (from Egypt to South Africa), China, Japan, the US, and Scandinavia. They consider some of the array of contemporary engagements: poems translated from Mandarin about the traumas of the frontline, Chinese calligraphic poetry printed on cartons of PPE, comments on the literary history of representing epidemics and pandemics, political analyses of the post-truth present, and the role of life-writing and gaming in an interrupted world. Given the generative and creative obliquity of many of its parts, this collection shifts how one thinks about the diseased present and the archival pasts on which it draws. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of English Studies in Africa.

The Plague's origins were mysterious, but its consequences were all too obvious: quarantined cities, safe-sex machines, Sex Police, the outlawing of old-fashioned love. Four people hold the fate of humanity in their hands...A sexual mercenary condemned to death as a foot soldier in the Army of the Living Dead; a scientist who's devoted his whole life to destroying the virus and now discovers he has only ten weeks to succeed; a God-fearing fundamentalist on his way to the presidency before he accepts a higher calling; and a young infected coed from Berkeley on a bizarre crusade to save the world with a new religion of carnal abandon. Each will discover that the only thing more dangerous than the Plague is the cure.

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.

This Norton Critical Edition of one of Defoe's most important works reprints the 1722 text, the only edition published in Defoe's lifetime.

Written during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed, these poems are suffused with Tsvetaeva's irony and humor, which undoubtedly accounted for her success in not only reaching the end of the plague year alive, but making it the most productive of her career. We meet a drummer boy idolizing Napoleon, an irrepressibly mischievous grandmother who refuses to apologize to God on Judgment Day, and an androgynous (and luminous) Joan of Arc. "Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would exhibit a curve - or rather, a straight line - rising at almost a right angle because of her constant effort to raise the pitch a note higher, an idea higher ... She always carried everything she has to say to its conceivable and expressible end. In both her poetry and her prose, nothing remains hanging or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is the unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (for us, the sense of ambivalence, of contradictoriness in the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means, by which it was transformed into the material of art." --Joseph Brodsky While your eyes follow me into the grave, write up the whole caboodle on my cross! 'Her days began with songs, ended in tears, but when she died, she split her sides with laugher!' --from Moscow in the Plague Year: Poems

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year has taken on a new relevance with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through an exploration of two chronologically distant societies in crisis, this study compares the attitudes, beliefs, and conduct of the public portrayed in the book and those in our own embattled Covid era. There are interesting similarities to note, with equivalents to the Covid-deniers and the anti-vaxxers to be found in Defoe's bleak vision of London in the 1660s as it descends into a state of chaos. JPY offers us some uncomfortable truths about human nature that resonate strongly in our own times, revealing how responding to a pandemic can bring out both the best and the worst in our character as we face up to a world where the old certainties no longer seem to apply. Pandemics expose the fault-lines in ideology, putting the social contract at risk - the question they pose is whether we can continue to rely on our current socio-political set-up or whether it requires a radical rethink. There is a pressing need for more debate on this issue, and this project is designed to make a case for that.

The original Journal of the Plague Year was written by Daniel Defoe in 1639. Plagues have been a recurrent fact of life since humans have existed. A virus or a bacterium makes the jump either from an animal or from a tribe who have long been habituated to the organism, and this novel infection races through the newly exposed populace, and a huge die-off of the new hosts occurs. The last major event was the Spanish influenza at the end of WWI. There have been events of concern such as SARS and Ebola, with other lesser events such as H1N1, MERS, and Hong Kong flu. While these potentially were a major problem, the Wuhan virus has turned out to be a new plague of disastrous dimensions. It remains to be seen if the catastrophic subsequent events were due to the virus itself or the hysterical overreaction to it. As an experienced doctor, with a large active clinical practice, I found I was often being asked the same questions as many patients were totally confused by the media and the changing and contradictory pronouncement from politicians and public health. I found I was answering so many questions in the office and on Facebook that it came to me, in April of 2020, that what I was doing was in fact compiling a “Journal of a Plague Year.” This book is a collection of sequential posts, almost all completely unedited. Also included were some questions and my answers.