Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans

This visceral account of the coronavirus years blends first-person, present-tense commentary about the pandemic with the perspective of a memoir, including other epidemics James Nolan survived, first polio as a boy then AIDS in San Francisco. The narrative is grounded in the social and political parallels drawn from writers who have explored past plagues, such as Boccaccio, Poe, Defoe, Pepys, Camus, Mann, Burroughs, and Kushner. These pages are largely focused on the author's native New Orl...