And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the COVID-19 Pandemic

Description

In this rich, eye-opening, and uplifting anthology, dozens of esteemed writers, poets, artists, and translators from more than thirty countries send literary dispatches from life during the pandemic. A portion of proceeds benefit booksellers in need. As our world is transformed by the coronavirus pandemic, writers offer a powerful antidote to the fearful confines of isolation: a window onto lives and corners of the world beyond our own. In Mauritius, a journalist contends with denialism and mourns the last days of summer, lost to the lockdown. In Paris, a writer struggles to protect his young son from fear. In Chile, protesters who prevailed against tear gas and rubber bullets are now halted by a virus. In Queens, after thirteen-hour shifts in the ER, a doctor dons running shoes and makes the long jog home. And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again takes its title from the last line of Dante's Inferno, when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to once again behold the beauty of the heavens. In that spirit, the stories, essays, poems, and artwork in this collection-from beloved authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Vargas Llosa, Eavan Boland, Daniel Alarcon, Jon Lee Anderson, Claire Messud, Ariel Dorfman, and many more-detail the harrowing experiences of life in the pandemic, while pointing toward a less isolated future. Together they comprise a profound global portrait of the defining moment of our time, and send a clarion call for solidarity across borders. Our literary culture depends on bookstores-and those irreplaceable sources of conversation and community, of inspiration and solace, have been decimated by the lockdown. Net proceeds from And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again will go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helps the passionate booksellers we readers depend upon.

Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic's Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile's Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans's work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."

"Mexican American writer and educator Stavans has gleaned powerful responses to the pandemic from 52 contributors who share their experiences in deftly crafted essays, poems, photographs, and artwork. . . . The impressive cast of contributors-Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Vargas Llosa, Claire Messud, Ariel Dorfman, Rivka Galchen, Daniel Alarcon, and others-reveal feelings of fear, loneliness, and, for some, a surprising sense of connection. . . . Although many look optimistically to the future, for others, the pandemic has laid bare a long plague of inequality and hatreds. Stirring reflections to illuminate dark times." -Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review "A genre- and border-crossing anthology of mostly translated reactions to the coronavirus [that] juxtaposes styles-poetry next to literary criticism, experimental fiction next to personal essay-in a way that is consistently disorienting and sometimes jarring, but pleasantly so. . . . Uncertainty is a driving theme in And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again. So is brokenness: broken bodies, hearts, medical systems, immigration systems, and more. . . . [French Tunisian writer Hubert Haddad's] story is a collage of fictional 'false starts, drafts, approximations, broken-off openings' that describe and evoke the 'hazy driftlessness' of quarantined life. Its choppy, static structure captures the dysfunction of pandemic time." -Lily Meyer, The Atlantic "A prism reflecting outrage, fear, bewilderment-and yes, even small joys, such as cleaner air with fewer cars on the streets. It's left to the arts to make sense of this scourge through eloquence. Ilan Stavans conducts here what one contributor calls 'a symphony of voices.' They sing of our despair while beseeching assurance. . . . Perhaps, in 2120, earthlings will open And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again as a time capsule, to read of their ancestors struggling to survive a year none of them ever imagined." -Lanie Tankard, On the Seawall