Forum / plague literature, anyone?

Ann Bogle
Oct 12, 01:59pm

I once caught oral thrush. I went to the student health service. The treatment was a single swallow of a red liquid that tasted and felt sort of like warm liquid jello before it is set in the refrigerator. Cured.

Ann Bogle
Oct 12, 02:08pm

This, too, will seem off-topic. Chekhov's "Ward 6" is brilliant and necessary. I own Ecco's 13-volume set of Chekhov's stories, and I am almost sure the story is not in any volume of that set. It is in Penguin's Lady With the Pet Dog volume, different in its contents than Ecco's Lady With the Pet Dog volume. In fact, the exact title varies a little, too. I would love to find out how those stories ended up ordered in volumes, whose decisions those are/were. "Ward 6" is about a provincial mental hospital far from St. Petersburg where a debtor and family man is held and a sadistic guard beats him. The doctor in the story realizes he has more in common with the debtor locked in the mental hospital than with anyone else in the tiny village and recommends the closing of the hospital, at the doctor's own peril. It is the only story Chekhov wrote in that year, 1992 or 1993.

Ann Bogle
Oct 12, 02:12pm

Margaret Atwood published a novel about the Influenza years near WWI -- I haven't read it.

strannikov
Oct 12, 02:25pm

Now that you mention Chekhov, Ann, I'm reminded at least of "Bed No. 29" by Maupassant, who set more than two stories in hospitals and spas treating some of the afflictions of the period, to say nothing of his stories of psychological terror, insanity, et cetera.

Ann Bogle
Oct 12, 03:28pm

I now have a hard cover Maupassant that I received as inheritance. There is a story in it called "The Jewels" and it is NOT "The Necklace," as I wondered at first if it might be. I want to read all of them. I'll take a look for "Bed No. 29" -- I guess Maupassant and Poe were considered both the best of their time. "Ward 6" is fairly long as stories go. I didn't know Chekhov wrote stories so quickly before that, David, wow.

David Ackley
Oct 14, 06:47pm

Chekhov began writing as a supplement to his and his extended family's income. He wrote very brief pieces ( "Flash" avant le lettre, peut-etre; essays, brief satirical pieces) that were published in newspapers and broadsheets for which he was paid a pittance. Give me a subject, he said, and in a few minutes I will provide you with a story. Mingled in among these were character sketches, brief anecdotes, vestigial short stories. He never considered himself anything more than a hack until he had a letter from a prominent editor and critic who praised his talent and reproved him for wasting it on trivia. He accepted the criticism and began then to write more seriously. Probably the better part of the more than 700 stories he wrote in his life were from the early period when he was writing for money and quickly. Many of them, are quite good, well worth reading.

strannikov
Oct 15, 11:27am

Latterly, the Oedipus plays (the Greek of Sophocles, the Latin of Seneca) qualify, though confessedly eye-gouging does not seem a hygienic response to an outbreak of plague: but as a Cousin Flannery character might remind us, "they wasn't as advanced as we are".

David Ackley
Oct 15, 06:26pm

Just thought of one, Margaret Atwood's ORYX AND CRAKE.

strannikov
Oct 16, 04:57pm

Shame on me, apologies to the late Michael Crichton, and DUH!: The Andromeda Strain.

Adam Sifre
Oct 27, 11:53am

I am shocked that zombie novels are not included here. More disrespect to the hygienically challenged.

Charlotte Hamrick
Oct 28, 12:59am

Oryx and Crake - yes. The entire MaddAddam trilogy is outstanding, IMO.