In Conversation: On Voices from the Pandemic: Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage, and Resilience & The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, a screenwriter, and the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, and God Save Texas: A Journey to the Soul of the Lone Star State. The End of October: A Novel, published last year, was a New York Times bestseller. In The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID (Knopf), Wright offers an unprecedented account of the COVID-19 pandemic – its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it. Wright takes us inside the CDC, the White House, a coronavirus ward in a Charlottesville hospital, and the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs. It follows the arc from the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, telling the story of the pandemic in authoritative detail and with accounts on both global and intimate scales, illuminating COVID-19’s medical, economic, political, and social ramifications. The New York Times called it a “virtuoso feat … A book of panoramic breadth … managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well.”

Eli Saslow is a reporter for The Washington Post. He is the author of Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President, American Hunger – which won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting – and Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, winner of the 2019 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Saslow was also a Pulitzer finalist in feature writing in 2013, 2016, and 2017. Voices from the Pandemic: Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage, and Resilience (Doubleday) is based on a series that won the 2020 George Polk award for Oral History. It’s a portrait of a country grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic – from fear and overwhelm to extraordinary resilience – told through first-person of people from across America. Saslow began interviewing a cross-section of Americans at the pandemic’s onset, capturing their experiences in real time: An exhausted and anguished EMT risking his life in New York City; a grocery store owner feeding his neighborhood for free in locked-down New Orleans; an overwhelmed coroner in Georgia; a Maryland restaurateur forced to close his family business after 46 years; rural citizens adamant that the whole thing is a hoax; retail workers attacked for asking people to wear masks; and patients struggling to breathe. These deeply personal accounts make for cathartic reading, as we see Americans at both their worst and their resilient best.

Sheri Fink is a medical doctor and journalist who writes about health, medicine, and science. She received a Pulitzer Prize for her story “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. The citation noted that it was “a story that chronicles the urgent life-and-death decisions made by one hospital’s exhausted doctors when they were cut off by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.” The investigative piece was the basis for her bestselling book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown), described by The New York Times as possessing “masterly reporting and the glow of fine writing.” She is also a correspondent at the Times, where her and her colleagues’ stories on the West Africa Ebola crisis were recognized with the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, Fink received her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (PublicAffairs), is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina.