Cormick McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Ling Ma. These are just a few of the

authors who've written pandemic-related novels. The topic has just been fascinating for writers

and readers for decades, but now the question is, will it survive COVID-19?

I would say for a lot of the acquisitions I saw and for a lot of the reading trends,

this gapism became really the predominant attitude of what people were choosing to read.

Cindy Huang is an editorial director at Berkeley Publishing House and has been in the business

for nearly 30 years. She says only the September 11th attacks even came close to having a similar impact.

Do I just ignore it in terms of my fiction? In terms of what I'm writing about, do I refer to it?

It was a really long time until people felt comfortable even reading about it.

9-11 was just one day, but we are still feeling the aftermath almost 20 years later.

So it's hard to imagine how long we're going to be picking up the pieces from this pandemic.

Huang predicts that we will want to read about it someday, and that it will be included even

in non-pandemic fiction in the years to come.

Those writers who are setting their novel in a contemporary America will probably have to deal with it in some way.

Even if it's only a glancing reference to, how is your face mask coming along?

Today, we're going to hear from an author and an editor about pandemics in fiction

and the future of literature post COVID-19. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta,

CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent, and this is coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

You know, I feel like this pandemic, the real one, not the one that I invented,

is a harbinger for pandemics that are on the way.

Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New Yorker.

And so I feel even more urgent about trying to get people accustomed to the idea

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