“How Have I Not Read This?” Book Club Discussion of The Plague

**This is a virtual event that will be hosted on Zoom - you will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing and sufficient Internet access. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.**

DIGITAL DOORS: 6:40PM EST (be the first to submit a question/participate in chat)

EVENT START: 7:00PM EST (or shortly after once all are checked in)

Join Emily St. John Mandel, Laura Marris, and Alice Kaplan for a live, virtual discussion of Albert Camus’s The Plague.

More than seventy years after its original publication, The Plague has become a national bestseller. Mandel, Marris, and Kaplan will explore themes of the novel, examine the era in which it was written, and look at responses to the work in the current environment. They will also answer any questions you have about it. THE PLAGUE is a haunting tale of human resilience and hope in the face of an epidemic that is ravaging a North African coastal town. This inaugural selection of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group’s “How Have I Not Read This?” book club was recently hailed as “a redemptive book, one that wills the reader to believe, even in a time of despair” (Los Angeles Times).

Read along with us at #HowHaveINotReadThis

This event is hosted in partnership with City Lights, the legendary bookstore in San Francisco. You can order The Plague from City Lights here: https://bookshop.org/a/1584/9780679720218

Alice Kaplan, Yale University’s Sterling Professor and chair of the Department of French, was quoted by NPR on April 1: "I never imagined I would be teaching this novel in the midst of an epidemic… I never imagined I'd need to give a trigger warning for teaching Camus' The Plague… People are saying in the French press, what do you absolutely need to read in this time? You need to read The Plague. Almost as though this novel were a vaccine — not just a novel that can help us think about what we're experiencing, but something that can help heal us."

Laura Marris is currently translating a new edition of The Plague to be published by Knopf in 2021. In The New York Times on April 16 she wrote: “I still hope that books from the past can be a kind of serum for the future, as Camus intended his novel to be. He knew that his book would be needed again, long after his death, in a context he couldn’t predict or imagine.”

Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, The Glass Hotel, is currently on bestseller lists nationwide. Her previous book, the National Book Award finalist Station Eleven, is itself one of our best looks at humanity before and after a pandemic.