“At the beginning of the pandemic, I couldn’t even read, much less write. The pandemic has now lasted into a second fall season for publishing, and a growing number of authors, among them Picoult, Louise Erdrich, Gary Shteyngart and Hilma Wolitzer, have worked it into their latest books. So, I was thinking, what exactly is the work a novel can do in the time of the novel coronavirus? Like Kumar, Erdrich had the original idea — a haunted bookstore — well before the virus spread. Conservative books have a large audience; right-wing commentator Mark R. Levin’s “American Marxism“ has sold hundreds of thousands of copies this summer.

Source: thestar August 18, 2021 16:07 UTC