The Books Briefing: Turning to Fiction to Cope With Fear

📚 Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

📚 The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel

What a 1722 account of plague reveals about new media

“[This] strange little book based on nearly a decade’s worth of collecting facts, accounts, stories, and anecdotes about the plague that hit London [in 1665] … is obsessed with how information, not just the plague, spreads.”

📚 A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe

📚 Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature, by Katherine Ellison

(Efrem Lukatsky / AP)

How zombies and superheroes conquered highbrow fiction

“Today’s serious writers are hybrid creatures—yoking the fantasist scenarios and whiz-bang readability of popular novels with the stylistic and tonal complexity we expect to find in literature.”

📚 Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

📚 The Passage, by Justin Cronin

📚 Red Moon, by Benjamin Percy

Chernobyl’s literary legacy

“Through three decades of literary response, Chernobyl has undermined the sort of authoritative depiction that might bring closure …  The finest works express profound doubts about the power of language to absorb a disaster of this magnitude, and so continually reopen it to new ways of being remembered.”

📚 Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich

📚 Accident: A Day’s News, by Christa Wolf

📚 “The Zero Meter Diving Team,” by Jim Shepard

How sci-fi writers imagine Iraq’s future

“It’s profound that in a country as ravaged as Iraq, the dystopian visions that have emerged in works such as Iraq + 100 and Frankenstein in Baghdad aren’t only grim and dark, but also hopeful.”

📚 Iraq + 100, edited by Hassan Blasim

📚 Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Rosa Inocencio Smith. She just placed a library hold on Severance, by Ling Ma.

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Rosa Inocencio Smith is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.