Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive. Should she escape from her rescuers? A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though.

Additionally, severance packages may be given to employees who are displaced by a merger or acquisition. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. A severance package extends a monetary payment to an outgoing employee or group of employees, typically when they are terminated for business reasons, such as during a round of layoffs. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. Illuminating, in spectacular and speculative fashion, how conditions of inequality and precarity are radically revealed and intensified by a public health crisis, novels like Severance and The Dreamers are essential tools for teaching about-and living through-the crisis of our pandemic present.Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. In particular, pregnancy plots in both novels work to interrogate cultures of paternalism, raising key ethical questions about limitations and violations of the bodily autonomy. This essay examines how two recent novels, Ling Ma's Severance (2018) and Karen Thomson Walker's The Dreamers (2019), offer feminist refigurations of the genre Priscilla Wald has termed 'the outbreak narrative.' Shifting emphasis from the epidemiological quest plot that has tended to dominate this genre, both novels focus on everyday cultures and ethics of care, illustrating how patriarchal systems produce and perpetuate conditions of vulnerability. While fiction may cultivate our expectations about the probable paths of the pandemic, it also invites us to participate in the creative process of imagining alternative futures.

The coronavirus pandemic has prompted renewed scholarly and popular interest in epidemic fiction, from biomedical thrillers to dystopian tales of disease-desolated worlds.

Severance ma