Viral Books
Viral Conjunctures Reading Group
An interdisciplinary book club exploring pandemic narratives, health humanities, and ecologies of contagion through fiction, theory, and visual culture.
28 Years Later (2025)
"Effortless Tears"
Alexander Kanengoni Zimbabwean short story (1993) offers an early narrative of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa
John Winthrop’s On Earthquakes (1755) and John Biddulph’s “A Poem on the Earthquake at Lisbon” (1755)
A discussion about the historical conjunctures of two planetary events, the Great New England Earthquake (November 18, 1755) and the Lisbon Earthquake (November 1, 1755), with the spread and public containment of infectious diseases.
Before She Sleeps
Bina Shah echoes the dystopian futures of Margaret Atwood through the lens of the “Green City” where gender selection, disease, and war have created a severe imbalance where women are forced to have multiple husbands to quickly reproduce and replenish the population. The story follows Sabine, a woman living in a secret collective of women who resist this system and provide intimate companionship to the elite, without sex. The novel explores themes of female oppression, the consequences of pandemics, and the potential for rebellion in the face of authoritarian control.
Discussion questions
- With multiple examples from literature and history to pull from, how does this book help us understand why draconian state measures are consistently directed against women in times of viral unrest?
- This text has been framed as one that shifts our gaze away from typically Western perspectives on reproductive rights. Does it? If so, in what ways?
- There are obvious parallels between Shah’s text and The Handmaid’s Tale. How does Shah move away from those parallels in order to create a unique perspective on the issues she raises?
- How is space used textually in Before She Sleeps to convey both isolation and resistance to the totalitarian state? How can we think of the Green City as a monstrous entity that naturalizes political violence and experimentation on women?
- Does the novel truly end on a liberatory note for change? Its ambiguity leaves us questioning whether such change is even possible.
- How does the novel raise questions about modes of resistance in a pre-pandemic world compared to a post-pandemic one, especially in relation to the uses of technology to form networks?
- The novel presents a compelling intersection of gender and environmental issues, and history. What imagery does Shah use to convey such an intersection? To what effect?
- Discuss how the legislation of sex work and women’s spaces (through the creation of state-sponsored guidebooks and the limitation of writing) beg questions of how literature enforces/deconstructs post-pandemic power dynamics. What is the symbolism behind the gold power as a shielding device for women?
- Borders become a contentious topic when dealing with viruses and pandemics. How does Shah incorporate the idea of (real or metaphorical) borders into her novel? How is the virus a political agent that contributes to the imagination of the border as a concept?
- What relation do borders have to the question of utopia/dystopia that underpins the novel?
- How does the novel bend genres by addressing the dystopian and postcolonial genres?
- How do women in the novel resist normative approaches to reproductive rights?
Celia de fréine Blood Debts (Fiacha Fola)
Blood Debts explores the Hepatitis C or Anti-D Scandal that struck Ireland in the 1970s. Caused by infected blood transfusions given to thousands of pregnant women, the resulting epidemic profoundly changed their lives.
Roxanna Bennett’s and Shane Neilson’s The Suspect We
A collaboration between two Canadian poets, The Suspect We (2023) experiments with a documentary poetics that recollects the pandemic through visions of and on the “mad, the neurodivergent, and the disabled.” The collection interrogates CanLit Politics and the lack of care practices as mutually dependent. In contrast, Neilson’s and Bennett’s conversations embody a practice of poetic and radical care of themselves and their readers.
COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology - Edited by Kendra Boileau and Rich Johnson
COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology(2021) is a collection of short comics dedicated to narrating the COVID-19 pandemic and the plethora of changes that became inherent to our daily lives Amidst this collection, featuring a wide range of artists and writers, editors Kendra Boileau and Rich Johnson have assembled stories ranging from the realist to the strange and uncanny, leading readers through poignant visual experiences of the pandemic, in both political and mundane forms. This collection not only addresses the adjustments to confinement, but also the exposure of the socio-political shortcomings of governments and institutions worldwide.
Discussion questions
- As a comic book, this text foregrounds questions of ‘form vs. content’ by its narrative nature. How does the explicit visuality of its form intersect with the pandemic-driven content?
- Formally, comics frequently deal with ruptures, as panel separations ( what is known as “the gutter”) imply jumps in time and space. How do such ruptures echo those of other narrative forms (like poetry), and to what effect?
- Similarly, how do these stories reflect the fluidity of perception (particularly, but not exclusively, of time) during contexts of pandemics – especially when considering the often postmodern and uneven ways that stories are told?
- Many stories reflect the political aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic over the biological. How does the visual nature of comics help address political issues in ways that the other texts we have addressed cannot?
- Another recurrent theme in this collection is the forced individuality of isolation. Yet, one gets the sense that this encourages a new kind of collectivity, in the end. How can we re-envision pandemic-related events and movements like Black Lives Matter or the resurgence of communal medicine within such a framing?
- Consider any one of the stories featured in the collection. How does its particular art style reflect or echo the story being told? Think about how you would produce the same story and what effect the potential changes you make would have on the story.
- The creators of these comics donated their work to the collection, meaning they were not paid. Instead, all sales proceeds were donated to charities dedicated to keeping booksellers afloat during the pandemic. Consider how art-as-activism may take on a new valence in such a context.
Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World: A Novel
Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World (2020) does not sing the apocalypse. Rather, it chronicles a fictional pandemic through a panoply of voices and tracks the various transformations brought about by a globally spreading virus. Nawaz’s critically acclaimed novel offers a narrative experiment that plays with computer modelling practices of infectious disease spread and allows the reader to explore the various media through which pandemics are narrated and “re-storyed”.
Pandemic and Narration: COVID-19 Narratives in Latin America
This collection of essays sheds light on what happened in Latin America from perspectives which foreground the ways COVID-19 was narrated in a variety of media, from official reports to songs. Taking a range of disciplinary approaches, the essays attend to the way that the spread of the virus in Latin America intersected with corruption, violence, and inequality on the one hand, but also with community, solidarity and hope on the other. This collection strives to offer as comprehensive a picture of the Latin American situation as possible, while firmly situating itself at the margins.
Discussion questions
- At what point – if such a point is identifiable – does narrative deconstruct the hegemonic discourses surrounding pandemics that are made evident in the essays of this text?
- How can we mobilize the concept of “narrative probability” to understand how different stories gained prominence in events like the COVID-19 pandemic?
- In what ways can we tie this work back to fiction like Before She Sleeps – especially in terms of postcolonial approaches to pandemic-related violence?
- This book focuses on Latin American responses to COVID-19. What can we identify as key points of difference – especially where ‘narrative mobilization’ is concerned – with responses in the rest of the world? Why and how do those differences matter?
- As the power of art to change the world seems dwindling what does this anthology do to demonstrate that such a perception may not be quite so accurate?
- Consider the term “passengers of absence.” What does this contradictory term evoke in considering narrative approaches to pandemics?
- This collection features multiplicities and mixed narratives. Consider how this might be a limitation as well as strength for understanding the impact of COVD-19 on Latin American communities, especially the Indigenous ones that were frequently silenced.
- Compared to North America’s response – which quickly gave way to commercialization – this collection highlights a more visceral response to the pandemic. Discuss the implications of such a situation.
Kevin Kerr's Unity (1918)
Instead of returning with love, peace, and stories of adventure, a Canadian soldier returns home from the Great War with a much greater threat: the “Spanish Flu.” The inhabitants of the small Prairie town of Unity is shaken, as a different kind of conflict is brought to their already-isolated home. In this dark comedy/modern gothic story, Kevin Kerr explores the dynamics of post-WW1 Canada in the grips of a new tragedy just as it exits the event that set the stage for the 20th century.
Discussion questions
- In what way does the play create parallels between the ending of the Great War and the emerging Spanish Flu epidemic?
- What kind of contemporary context could have inspired Kevin Kerr to write this play on pandemic and war in 2002?
- What role does media and technology – often associated with virality in the 21st century – play in allowing for the easy spread of the virus?
- Sound (ringing phones, bells, train horns) is also used to convey the eerie encroaching of the Spanish Flu. Why emphasize that sense over others to approach that sense of dread?
- What impact does the choice of writing this play as a black comedy have on how we perceive its subject matter?
- The play offers many parallels with literary modernism (Woolf, Joyce, Beckett). How can we read Unity (1918) as a rewriting of the modernist text?
- The discourse of eugenics was significant in the early 20th century. How does the play critically engage with such fraught ideas in the 21st century?
- Discuss the underlying status of immigrant families in Western Canada in relation to the more overtly addressed virus that propels the play forward.
- How do we envision staging this play, with its parallel storylines and its dream-like quality which reflects the characters’ delirium?
- Kerr, especially through the character of Sunna, creates a link between the act of learning intimacy and that of dying. Discuss how these seemingly dislocated acts can reinforce one another.
- Discuss how multiple characters (Glen, Sunna, Beatrice, etc.) seem to occupy dual roles in the play, especially ones that extend into supernatural domains, like the Angel of Death.