a Plagur of Secrets New York Times Review
letters
Fiction With a Covid Theme: Will It Sell?
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To the Editor:
Re "Writers Wonder if People Want to Ringlet Up With a Covid Novel" (front page, Feb. 21):
Novelists fear they won't get their readers on board past addressing worldwide illness, suffering and death? They probably won't, as readers remember: We all lived it; why would we want to read about it?
Sadly, there's so much to be learned spiritually and emotionally past earthworks into the experience of the past 2 years, but we avoid the vulnerability of sadness and loneliness. Grieving is treated like an illness requiring "healing" instead of a universal experience of love that must notice expression.
I'm glad that there are some novelists and artists willing to take a hazard, along with their publishers. Their work might not be popular, merely much of the world's greatest art didn't sell in its solar day.
Penny Parkin
Doylestown, Pa.
The writer is a licensed clinical social worker.
To the Editor:
Isabel Allende is quoted as proverb, "The feel of the whole planet frozen in place because of a virus is so extraordinary that I am sure information technology will be used extensively in literature."
I hope and then. These years changed me, and I want to know how they changed others. Good fiction tells the truth.
I've been an advice columnist since 1994. One girl recently emailed me: "It'south been so hard to live life the way I've imagined. … And so much of high school was from backside a screen, I don't recollect I made the lasting memories I wanted to make." Ouch. At least books — and even a Q. and A. column — can help her feel less alone.
Last yr, I began writing a coming-of-age novel near ii sixth graders who are uprooted during a pandemic. The boy and the girl get friends — and more. They even share a masked first kiss. Will it find a publisher? Who knows?
I hope editors say: Bring on the pandemic novels. But I tin see why it's a tough call.
Carol Weston
Armonk, Due north.Y.
The author is the writer of books for young people and an communication columnist at Girls' Life.
To the Editor:
As both a retired neurosurgeon and a poet, I read your article about Covid novels and their readership with great interest. Equally reader and writer I have frequently constitute that the best literary treatments of serious problems come at the field of study tangentially.
For instance, Gary Shteyngart's comic novel "Our Land Friends" barely mentions facts nigh the epidemic and never uses the proper name for the virus. The early and transient allusions to masks and social distance are made by a funny and somewhat neurotic psychiatrist.
I was also surprised to see no mention in your article of "The Plague," by Albert Camus, the greatest novel about an epidemic ever written, in this instance an imaginary outbreak in the 1940s with an analysis of social behavior eerily predictive of our recent feel.
My new volume, "Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems," has an entire section of "Plague Poems." The brevity of about poems, their use of tangential subjects (no mention of such terms as coronavirus or Covid necessary) and their attending to psychological subtlety may requite them an advantage over most novels.
Michael Salcman
Baltimore
The Bravery of Photojournalists
Epitome
To the Editor:
My admiration goes to the brave men and women photographers who take a chance their lives daily in the Ukrainian disharmonize. They provide u.s.a. with vital firsthand, upwards-close photojournalism. They capture the essence of boxing and suffering.
While serving in the Public Data Office in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, I asked photojournalists why they took such risks. They frequently said, "The shot was better when I got closer."
Nosotros cannot predict where this conflict will lead, but because of the bravery of these photojournalists, we are sharing the excruciating ordeal of the Ukrainian people.
Albert Husted
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Ukraine'south Lithium: A Motive for War?
To the Editor:
Re "Earlier War, Race Was On for Ukraine's Lithium" (Scientific discipline Times, March 8):
As a former U.S. diplomat and academy instructor, I can talk nigh geopolitical themes with the best of those trying to explicate the Russian motives for its war in Ukraine. But your revelation virtually Ukraine'southward largest in the globe lithium reserves — and its pregnant in terms of the electric cars of the future — suggests that we may have a war propelled by old-fashioned industrial greed.
If then, the Westward's measured response, fearing nuclear confrontation, tin now be ramped up to deny what may have essentially been a Russian endeavour to reclaim the Soviet Union's command of Ukraine's resource.
Godfrey Harris
Los Angeles
Danger at the Intersection
Prototype
To the Editor:
Re "Raising Crosswalks to Make Deadly Intersections Safer" (news article, March 4):
I am pleased to encounter — finally! — some applied action being taken to make crosswalks safer, but I notice that ane element of risk in crossing our streets is substantially ignored.
In my Park Slope neighborhood, scooters and bicycles present a much greater danger than cars. They consistently run ruby-red lights, go the wrong way down 1-way streets and ride on sidewalks. They well-nigh always exercise these things at great speed, endangering themselves, pedestrians and even drivers who may have to swerve or slam on the brakes to avoid hitting them.
These raised crosswalks will, I think, force the cyclists to slow down, though I wonder — since they ignore signs and lights anyway — how many will however get full speed ahead and be thrown off their bikes.
The city actually needs to beginning examining ways to concord both delivery and leisure cyclists to the law, for the condom of all.
Linda Strang
Brooklyn
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/opinion/letters/covid-fiction-novels.html
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