In this piercing and unforgettable memoir, the award-winning poet reflects on a year of turbulence, fear, and hope. For acclaimed British-Guyanese writer Fred D’Aguiar, 2020 was a year of personal and global crisis. The world around him was shattered by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States, California burned, and D’Aguiar was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Year of Plagues is an intimate, multifaceted exploration of these seismic events. Combining personal reminiscence and philosophy, D’Aguiar confronts profound questions about the purpose of pursuing a life of writing and teaching in the face of overwhelming upheavals; the imaginative and artistic strategies a writer can bring to bear as his sense of self and community are severely tested; and the quest for strength and solace necessary to help forge a better future. Drawn from two cultural perspectives—his Caribbean upbringing and his American lifestyle—D’Aguiar’s beautiful and challenging memoir is a paean of resistance to despotic authority and life-threatening disease. In his first work of nonfiction, D’Aguiar subverts the traditional memoir with highly charged language that shifts from the lyrical to the quotidian, from the metaphysical to the personal. While his experience could not be darker, its rendering is tinged with light and joy, captured in prose that unfolds in wonderful, unexpected ways. Both tender and ferocious, Year of Plagues is a harrowing yet uplifting genre-bending memoir of existence, protest, and survival.

The original Journal of the Plague Year was written by Daniel Defoe in 1639. Plagues have been a recurrent fact of life since humans have existed. A virus or a bacterium makes the jump either from an animal or from a tribe who have long been habituated to the organism, and this novel infection races through the newly exposed populace, and a huge die-off of the new hosts occurs. The last major event was the Spanish influenza at the end of WWI. There have been events of concern such as SARS and Ebola, with other lesser events such as H1N1, MERS, and Hong Kong flu. While these potentially were a major problem, the Wuhan virus has turned out to be a new plague of disastrous dimensions. It remains to be seen if the catastrophic subsequent events were due to the virus itself or the hysterical overreaction to it. As an experienced doctor, with a large active clinical practice, I found I was often being asked the same questions as many patients were totally confused by the media and the changing and contradictory pronouncement from politicians and public health. I found I was answering so many questions in the office and on Facebook that it came to me, in April of 2020, that what I was doing was in fact compiling a “Journal of a Plague Year.” This book is a collection of sequential posts, almost all completely unedited. Also included were some questions and my answers.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Diario del año de la peste: Un Diario del Año de la Peste: Observaciones o Memorias de los sucesos más notables, tanto públicos como privados, que ocurrieron en Londres durante la última gran visita de 1665, comúnmente llamado Diario del Año de la Peste es un libro de Daniel Defoe, publicado por primera vez en marzo de 1722. Escrito en realidad sesenta años después de que la peste de 1665 arrasara Londres, Defoe da vida a la ciudad en toda su penuria y temor. Con todo lujo de detalles, "Diario del año de la peste" parece casi un relato de primera mano, que lleva al lector por los barrios, las casas y las calles que han cambiado drásticamente con el creciente número de muertos. El ajetreo de los negocios y los recados da paso a las puertas marcadas con la cruz que significa casa de la muerte, así como a los carros de difuntos que transportan a los abatidos a las fosas comunes, a medida que el número de muertos aumenta hasta casi 100.000. A medida que la epidemia avanza y el narrador se encuentra con más historias de aislamiento y horror, Defoe revela su magistral equilibrio como escritor tanto histórico como imaginativo.