The Viral Underclass

Celadon Books
Paperback
384 pages • $19.99
ISBN: 9781250796646

The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide

Steven W. Thrasher

“The pandemic brought America’s health inequities into stark relief, but The Viral Underclass illustrates that the problem isn’t new, and that it is embedded more deeply than many of us realize . . . Thrasher, a gay Black man, brings figures from the viral underclass to life in this engaging, enraging read.”

—Jennifer Latson, The Boston Globe

Having spent a groundbreaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Steven W. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone. Told through the heartrending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, The Viral Underclass helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.

© C.S. Muncy

Steven W. Thrasher, Ph.D., is the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair at Northwestern University’s Medill School, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus on LGBTQ research. He is also a faculty member of Northwestern University’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. His writing has been widely published by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Journal of American History, BuzzFeed News, The Village Voice, and Scientific American. A recipient of grants from the Ford and Sloan foundations, Dr. Thrasher was named one of the hundred most influential and impactful people of 2019 by Out magazine for his research on HIV/AIDS.

Strangers to Ourselves

Picador
Paperback
288 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781250872913

Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Rachel Aviv

“This deeply empathetic book raises probing questions about our psychiatric system and the very nature of self-identity.”

—Kristen Martin, NPR (Best Books of 2022)

Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman celebrated as a saint who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s gripping exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does. Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives—and our identities, too. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.

© Gioncarlo Valentine

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, education, and criminal justice, among other subjects. In 2022, she won a National Magazine Award for Profile Writing. A 2019 national fellow at New America, she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her work on this book. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Meth Lunches

St. Martin’s Press
Hardcover
240 pages • $30.00
ISBN: 9781250278777

Food and Longing in an American City

Kim Foster

Food is a conduit for connection; we envision smiling families gathered around a table—eating, happy, content. But what happens when poverty, mental illness, homelessness, and addiction claim a seat at that table? In The Meth Lunches, Kim Foster peers behind the polished visions of perfectly curated dinners and charming families to reveal the complex reality when poverty and food intersect. Whether it’s heirloom vegetables or a block of neon-yellow government cheese, food is both a basic necessity and a nuanced litmus test: what and how we eat reflects our communities, our cultures, and our place in the world. The Meth Lunches gives a glimpse into the lives of people living in Foster’s Las Vegas community—the grocery store cashier who feels safer surrounded by food after surviving a childhood of hunger; the inmate baking a birthday cake with coffee creamer and Sprite; the unhoused woman growing scallions in the slice of sunlight on her passenger seat. This is what food looks like in the lives of real people. The Meth Lunches reveals stories of dysfunction intertwined with hope, of the insurmountable obstacles and fierce determination all playing out on the plates of ordinary Americans.

© Lucy Foster

Kim Foster is a James Beard Award-winning food writer. She writes about people at the intersection of food and mental illness, family separation, poverty, addiction, trauma, and incarceration. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada with her husband, David, their four kids, and many animals.