Experience the power of masterful storytelling with "Pandemic Love and Other Stories". This compelling book invites you to step into the vividly drawn world of four short stories, each depicting people facing crises in their lives. Gaurav tries to save the life of his friend in "Pandemic Love". Nirav is haunted by separation from daughter, who has been taken away by his estranged wife. In "Voices", a surgeon struggles with a debilitating condition and must choose between her work and risking her patients' lives. "His Secret" explores the painful reality of a mother grappling with her son's hidden struggles. "M4M Seeking LTR" follows a middle-aged gay man who has spent his entire life seeking a long-term relationship, now facing old age and mortality. Meanwhile, in "The Curse of the Astral Body", Ramya's family falls apart as she seeks to escape strange coincidences and vicissitudes, wavering between faith healing and psychiatric help. Through the captivating storytelling of these unforgettable characters, you will be transported into their world, grappling with the complexities of love, loss, and the passage of time. With a writing style that is at once spare and lyrical, the author conveys deep emotion with just a few well-chosen words, leaving a lasting impression on the reader. https://www.ananyaseo.com/pandemic-love-and-other-stories/

Eminent CBC journalist Ian Hanomansing profiles the Canadian doctors who stepped up to guide the nation through its worst medical crisis in a century. Most medical doctors, are accustomed to living lives of quiet dedication far from the public eye. What is it like for conscientious professionals like them when a country panicked by pandemic is suddenly beating down their doors desperate for answers? One of the remarkable features of the Covid-19 pandemic is the strength and compassion of the previously low-profile doctors who took to the public stage to lead the bewildered nation through the pandemic, counteracting misinformation and articulating the most up-to-date medical advice on avoiding infection and reducing viral transmission. British Columbia’s Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry attracted international attention for her calm, empathetic and evidence-based approach. Ontario infectious disease specialists Dr. Zain Chagla and Dr. Sumon Chakrabati advocated passionately for effective measures within the South Asian community disproportionately affected by the virus. Dr. Lisa Barrett and her infectious disease colleagues at Dalhousie University lobbied to set up rapid testing in places like bars, sports centres and university campuses in order to detect those unwittingly spreading the virus and to provide an early warning of potential outbreaks. Hanomansing captures the perspective and insights of doctors from coast to coast who accepted roles as public advocates and advisors, exploring the impact of unaccustomed celebrity as well as the skepticism, resistance and even hostility that sometimes went as far as death threats from Covid-deniers. Few of the stories to come out of the pandemic are as inspiring as this one of the doctors, scientists and health officials who transcended their accustomed roles to become public symbols of trust and hope. As they prepare to return to their private careers, they respond to Hanomansing’s invitation to detail lessons learned and measures that need to be taken to improve the response to future deadly pandemics. All author royalties from sales of the book will go to UBC’s Centre for Health Education Scholarship.

Rough Waters and Other Stories is a collection of original stories addressing different ethical questions and dilemmas. An introduction makes connections among the stories, puts them in personal and political perspective, and anchors them in a tragic understanding of life and ethics. The characters in Rough Waters and Other Stories – some based on real historical people - must make or finesse ethical choices, some of them straight-forward, others tragic in nature. Tragic choices involve trade-offs between seemingly irreconcilable but important goals. Alternatively, they entail committing ourselves to decisions or policies whose outcomes are uncertain. We are desperate to avoid tragic choices and prone to convince ourselves – often in the face of good evidence – that we can satisfy all of our desires or needs instead of making difficult choices between or among them. We also tend to convince ourselves that our decisions or policies well succeed in proportion to the degree that we feel compelled to commit to them. A standard trope of Greek tragedy – think here of Oedipus – is that our choices sometimes lead directly to the outcomes we are trying desperately to avoid.

Danse Macabre and Other Stories: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Global Dynamics examines the world using a systemic and psychoanalytic lens, including concepts of splitting, separation, projection, displacement, and the return of the repressed. They consider what impact the disappearance of some iconic and psychic containers has on individuals' functioning and why we choose populist leaders to shore up our own social defences. They question why the world feels so threatening to the twenty-first-century linked-in citizens when the objective facts suggest that overall much is improving for the global citizen. Building on their previous work, Halina Brunning and Olya Khaleelee have created a coherent framework in order to conceptualise global dynamics within a matrix form. The matrix contains dialectic dynamic forces for both good and evil, love and hate, creation and destruction. They take a closer look at the plethora of phenomena which they see arising therein. Whilst the matrix holds steady, inside it is a world in constant flux, reconfiguring and rearranging itself, as if in a kaleidoscope, with inevitable and unavoidable turbulence, but - Brunning and Khaleelee hypothesise - with an underlying pattern that is available to be discerned and studied. Aware of this turbulence, Brunning and Khaleelee wish to share their view of the world in the hope of offering a containing reflection, capable of calming the nerves of the readers as well as their own.

This book centers on negotiations around cultural, governmental, and individual constructions of COVID-19. It considers how the coronavirus pandemic has been negotiated in different cultures and countries, with the final part of the volume focusing on South Asia and Pakistan in particular. The chapters include auto-ethnographic accounts and ethnographic explorations that reflect upon experiences of living with the pandemic and its implications for all areas of life. The book explicates people’s dealings with COVID-19 at various levels, situates the spread of rumors, conspiracy theories, and new social rituals within micro- and/or macro-contexts, and describes the interplay between the virus and various institutionalized forms of inequalities and structural vulnerabilities. Bringing together a variety of perspectives, the volume relates to the past, describes the Covidian present, and offers futuristic implications. It enlists distinct imaginaries based on current understandings of an extraordinary challenge that holds significant importance for our human future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a host of critical reflections about discourse practises dealing with public health issues. Situating crisis communication at the centre of societal and political debates about responses to the pandemic, this volume analyses the discursive strategies used in a variety of settings. Exploring how crisis discourse has become a part of managing the public health crisis itself, this book focuses on the communicative tasks and challenges for both speakers and their public audiences in seven areas: - establishment of discursive and political authority - official governmental and expert communication to the public - public understanding of government communication - legitimation of public health management as a 'war' - judging and blaming a collective other - cross-national comparison and rivalry - empathy and encouragement Covering global discourses from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and New Zealand, chapters use corpus-based data to cast light on these issues from a variety of languages. With crisis discourse already the object of fierce national and international debates about the appropriateness of specific communicative styles, information management and 'verbal hygiene', Pandemic and Crisis Discourse offers an authoritative intervention from language experts.