| Authors and publishers aren't happy about the 'National Emergency Library' | |
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| The Thread's Must-Read | 
"The End of October" by Lawrence Wright
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Everyone is already talking about Lawrence Wright’s pandemic novel, “The End of October” to be published in May. He’s a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and author of the Pulitzer Prize winning “The Looming Tower,” among many other terrific books.
So even if we weren’t in the midst of a pandemic, we’d be paying attention to this novel which, these days, reads like anything but fiction.
Here’s the setup: World Health Organization biologist, Dr. Henry Parsons, arrives at a camp in Sumatra where more than 40 people have died from a hemorrhagic fever. In the hot zone, he discovers three doctors among the dead and half-finished notes from a scientist who has quickly recognized how lethal the disease is.
But it’s already too late. By the time Parsons has discovered the so-called “Patients Zero,” the disease is racing into the Middle East and will soon spread across the globe and into the United States.
I don’t know that I’ve ever had a reading experience quite like this one: Immersed in the fictional drama of virus-hunting scientists, sluggish governments and a world in lockdown even as I watched the death toll from the novel coronavirus accelerate was uncanny and disturbing.
It was also disturbing to see how prescient Wright was in his novel about the mistakes and the miscalculations that gave his fictional virus such a deadly head start.
I'll sit down with Wright for an interview in late April.
—Kerri Miller |
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 | | Tomie DePaola, author of 'Strega Nona,' has died | | The author and illustrator — who, by his own reckoning, worked on more than 270 titles — died Monday at age 85. Among his classics is the Caldecott winner “Strega Nona,” a seemingly ancient folk tale. | |
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 | | Gloria Steinem on activism, patriarchy and political power | | "The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off" by Gloria Steinem |
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Feminist activist and journalist Gloria Steinem recently joined Kerri Miller for a frank and wide-ranging conversation about patriarchy in the past and present; the status of the Equal Rights Amendment today; and what it would take for a woman to hold the office of president. | | |
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