Swimming Through the Flotsam in Which We Live and Move and Have Our Being

About the Book

A plague was erupted. The victim suffers a two-month latent period during which he is infectious but shows no symptoms. The virus is spread by aerosol, so that millions of people are soon infected and infectious, but without knowing it. At the “climax” of he disease, there is what a character calls “a rite of distribution.” At the climax the victim does what he or she most wanted or feared doing, the idea being that this kind of fear is laced with fascination. As America (like the rest of the world) sinks into chaos, as the Red Deaths kills forty percent of the population, two fiercely antagonistic groups emerge. There’s the apocalyptic religious group called Swimmers, because their charismatic leader was first seen swimming out of the Hudson River. The other group jokingly calls itself Our Gang, a very mixed group that has become immune to the plague as a by-product of an experimental treatment of herpes. What they see and do as they hike north from New York City to a farm upstate forms the substance of the novel.

About the Author

For forty years George Stade was a professor of English and Comparative literature at Columbia University, where he earned the Great Teacher Award. During that time, he published three novels, a collection essays, and well over a hundred articles, reviews, and introductions for such journal as Partisan Review, Hudson Review, Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, Nation, New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the Consulting Editor Director of Barnes and Noble Classics. He lives in New York City with his wife. His four grown-up children live north of the City, outside Washington D.C., and in Boulder.