Nearly two years after the start of COVID-19 social-distancing protocols and lockdowns, the pandemic is still a thing we think about — and live with — daily. Its constant presence and the way it has changed our world has had an impact on everything, including literature.
I, like I'm sure many others, had no interest in reading books about plagues generally or about how we were dealing with COVID-19 more specifically over the last two years. But as this pandemic seems like it will eventually turn into an epidemic or become endemic, I have started freeing myself up to read about these topics beyond daily news — and to start looking back, and forward, with literature that either mentions COVID-19 or features it a central element of its narrative. And from the slew of books coming out this year, it seems like other have too (or at least publishing houses think they have!).
Pandemic fiction and nonfiction began more quickly trickling into our libraries and bookstores in the second half of 2021, and has since found a growing presence. We've seen novels like Louise Erdrich's The Sentence, Catherine Ryan Howard's 56 Days, Amitava Kumar's A Time Outside This Time, and Sarah Hall's Burntcoat. There have also been anthologies like COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology, Lockdown: Stories of Crime, Terror, and Hope During a Pandemic, and And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the Covid-19 Pandemic (the latter two of these actually came out in 2020). All directly address the pandemic and chronicle how it has affected our lives, relationships, plans, and productivity.
Read the full article: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/24/1079823095/are-we-ready-for-covid-19-as-a-central-theme-in-literature
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