Samuel Ginsburg just published Untouched: Speculative Visions of Quarantine in the Fiction of Maielis González and Brenda Peynado in Caribbean Studies. Quarantine fiction has emerged as an important genre for understanding the physical, emotional, and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. These stories highlight both personal struggles and the inequalities within the shared experience of sheltering in pace. Two Caribbean authors, Cuban Maielis González and Dominican American Brenda Peynado, offer two versions of quarantine fiction that reframe popular understandings of health, safety, and personal responsibility, while questioning the utility of technology in maintaining humanity and connection. In González’s Ni Vivos ni Muertos, a woman revels in her imagined illness and impending death in a way that challenges official rhetoric concerning the public health crisis. In Peynado’s The Touches, quarantined subjects eventually give in to their thirst for intimacy, highlighting the roles of fear and risk in infection mitigation. Both stories use speculation to highlight the ways that quarantine forces people to rethink concepts of the home, the body, and the outside.
