William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City imagines the destruction of London as a result of human-induced environmental devastation, the threat of which is becoming increasingly visible today. This first critical edition of Hay’s novella makes available his account of one man’s tale of survival amidst a toxic fog—a survival that includes his relocation to Maoriland in New Zealand. The editors foreground the relevance of the story to present and future pandemics, the persistence of environmental disasters, and the global population’s ongoing migration to cities. They place the narrative in dialogue with nineteenth-century concerns about climate change, pollution, natural resources, health care, empire, and (sub)urbanization that have remained significant challenges as we come to terms with the lasting impacts of the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century.

We asked editors Michael Kramp and Sarita Jayanty-Mizin to reflect on their aims, processes, and discoveries in the development of this important critical resource by interviewing one another this past January.

Sarita: I’d like to start by sharing that it was Michael who first invited me to join him on this project, as he was the person who initially identified The Doom of the Great City as a text in need of a critical edition. This text has not received much attention since its initial publication in 1880, so I’d like to invite him to say a little more about how he first located this story and what he found compelling enough to consider proposing the first critical edition of the text.

Michael: I was researching materials for a different project (Patriarchy’s Creative Resilience, 2024) in the British Library, and I was trying to locate late-Victorian examples of speculative fiction that included compelling examples of patriarchal masculinity. I was taken aback by the pathetic performance of the male narrator of The Doom of the Great City, especially how his sentimentality and pronouncements of nostalgic remorse allow him to garner sympathy from his family and readers.Read More »

Last month we launched a new book series, Connective Tissue, dedicated to the health
humanities with a focus on narrative medicine. The series is edited by writer and scholar Renée K. Nicholson, MFA, former director of the Humanities Center at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. Connective Tissue seeks to provide a range of books for clinicians, artists, writers, scholars, and others to more fully engage with health humanities, narrative medicine, and art in medicine. As the field of health humanities programs in narrative medicine grows, so does the need for a literature that includes creative works, critical theoretical work, and, importantly, hybrids of the two as it relates to health, illness, medicine, and related subjects. “I’m excited to see how the Connective Tissue Series will create an intentional venue for work that explores the breadth and depth of the health humanities, art in medicine, and narrative medicine,” says Nicholson.Read More »

Megan Howell’s book Softie: Stories is about a fantastical range of people; a former child-star haunted by a past she can’t remember, an Afro-French girl with an obsession for earlobes, a loner whose only friend is hiding a terrible, otherworldly secret. What each of these stories shares in common are situations that are sometimes fantastical, sometimes commonplace but always strange. From a Corsican vacation-town in its off-season to hospital rooms and a seedy hotel suite in Chicago, experience the everyday come fully untethered from reality.

The following is one of the short stories from the now-available book.Read More »