The worn trope—Time Devours All Things (tempus edax rerum)—is true for human beings, says Shakespeare: if you’re a mortal, death lurks at the heart of the very thing you most want. During a plague, or a pandemic, it’s wanting that endangers us.
When we can't turn to the federal government for the truth, sometimes we need to turn to fiction. Sam J. Miller's Blackfish City maps a pandemic in a post-United States future.
Join us -- at a safe distance -- on this journey through the canonical and radical as we look to literary representations of pandemics in the past to help us understand the politics and possibilities of the present COVID-19 pandemic.
Rather than write about death and the world unfolding in the throes of the Black Plague, Giovanni Boccaccio instead wrote about the utopian potential of storytelling.
