Published shortly before the author's death in 1919, The Journal of a Disappointed Man presents a remarkable memoir that addresses struggles with poverty, inadequate education, and the creeping paralysis of multiple sclerosis. Yet author W. N. P. Barbellion manages to write with uplifting eloquence and passion of his love for family, natural history, music, and literature. Told with a thoroughly modern voice, the unjustly overlooked Journal is reprinted here with its posthumous successor, A Last Diary. This edition features a thoughtful Introduction by H. G. Wells, who writes of the book's "exquisite beauty." W. N. P. Barbellion (1889–1919), whose real name was Bruce Frederick Cummings, was a naturalist who worked in the Entomology Department of London's Natural History Museum. Upon attempting to enlist in the British Army during World War I, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The discovery of his disease intensified the tenor of his journal-keeping, and his frank and articulate reflections on coping with a fatal illness remain a powerful testament to his life and struggles.

“ On Immunity is a book I’ve recommended too many times to count―a searching, empathetic, ultimately unassailable argument, not just for vaccination but for thoroughly acknowledging our interdependence, and for all that becomes necessary and possible once we do. Written before COVID, it nonetheless speaks directly to the concerns of the pandemic era―to the fact that we are dangerous as well as vulnerable, to the way collective well-being and individual self-interest are configured at odds to one another when they are fundamentally intertwined.”―Jia Tolentino In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses our fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what may be in our children's air, food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Reflecting on her own experience as a new mother, she suggests that we cannot immunize our children, or ourselves, against the world. As she explores the metaphors surrounding immunity, Biss extends her conversations with other mothers to meditations on the myth of Achilles, Voltaire's Candide , Bram Stoker's Dracula , Rachel Carson's Silent Spring , Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors , and beyond. On Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected-our bodies and our fates.

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. A Penguin Classic First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.