Hey, it's Ampher's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It's been interesting to see how different works of art handle the pandemic now that we're, sheesh, yeah, a few years past the early days of COVID.

Like, if you're writing contemporary fiction, do you ignore it or address it? Does it play a key part or is it just in the background?

How much COVID stuff do you need

to have versus how much is the audience willing to handle? Today on the pod, we've got two massive authors

who plays their novels squarely in pandemic times. In a bit, Michael Cunningham, the guy who wrote

The Hours, talks about writing human beings in a pandemic versus, you know, writing

about a pandemic. But first, and Piers Leila Fadol talks to Sigrid Nunez, whose book

The Vulnerables uses animals as a way of talking about loneliness and caring. That's after the break.

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Animals loom large in the novels of Sigrid Nunez.

The friend, which won a National Book Award in 2018, addresses mourning with the help of a

Great Dane.

Mitz from 1998 is the biography of a tiny marmoset monkey.

Her 2010 apocalyptic novel, Salvation City, about a global flu pandemic, features a basset hound named Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, just like the Bob Dylan song.

In The Vulnerables, her ninth novel out today, Nunez takes her readers to another pandemic, New York, in COVID lockdown in 2020.

Her narrator, an unnamed writer, ends up caring for a macaw parrot whose owner gets stuck in California.

It's an ode to our basic need to connect with other beings, be the human or animal, even in a global

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