At the end of October, Lanternfish Press will be releasing The Afflictions: a mini-encyclopedia of strange and fantastical diseases. Trust me when I say that these illnesses range from the spine-tingling to the thought-provoking.

In honor of the fast-approaching official release (party on November 5, y’all!), we’ve gathered some of literature’s more unusual diseases. If these were real…I might never go outside again.

Plague of Insomnia (Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude)

The Plague of Insomnia strikes the small, secluded town of Macondo when a young orphan named Rebeca makes her way out of the forest. When she is welcomed into the Buendía household, she unwittingly infects her new adoptive family, which in turn spreads the infection throughout the entire town of Macondo.

The plague causes those who are infected to have wide, glowing, cat-like eyes. They can’t sleep, but they aren’t tired in the slightest, and are therefore able to work all day and night. (You know how there’s just not enough time in the day? Well, now there is!)

Sounds like this disease isn’t too bad: You can’t sleep, but you’re not exhausted. You can finally take care of all the things you’ve been meaning to. But there’s a big catch: everyone who becomes infected eventually loses all his or her memories. Victims of the disease forget names, faces, even how simple tools are supposed to work or what basic household items are used for. Eventually they even forget their own identities. Not exactly worth all the extra hours of productivity, after all. 

Spattergroit (J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

We can’t have a list of fictional ailments without including Harry Potter, right? Spattergroit is only mentioned briefly in the books, but the symptoms are certainly memorable. The infected person develops horrible purple pustules all over their face. After the fungus reaches the throat, the victim becomes mute.

What’s really interesting about this fantastical disease is the cure: you have to stand naked in a barrel of eel’s eyes under the light of a full moon, with a toad’s liver strapped to your throat. Hey, whatever works…but you have to wonder how many experiments the wizard doctors went through before they came up with this particular cure.

Red Death (Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death)

Of course we weren’t going to compile a list of fake diseases and leave out Edgar Allan Poe, either. The Red Death, highly contagious and always fatal, made the wealthy aristocrats of the town barricade themselves in a tower, waiting for the plague to die out with the last of its victims. While they enjoyed masquerade balls and lavish parties, the citizens outside were dying of the gruesome disease.

Victims of the Red Death suffered convulsions, sweated blood, and died within half an hour. That’s right, blood from every pore…nuff said. Maybe the really fantastical thing here is that they lasted a whole half hour. 

Greyscale (George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire)

Westeros, home of epic Machiavellian politics and bloody battles, has its share of illness too. This disease is usually fatal, because of course it is. People who contract greyscale are usually children, because George R.R. Martin is a monster, but adults can catch it too, and it’s usually worse for them than it is for the youth of Westeros. It mostly affects those who live in damp, cold climates.

Victims of the disease suffer as their skin grows stiff, crackling, and stone-like. In children, the scales only partially cover the skin, whereas adults usually find their entire bodies covered by the disease. Children who contract the illness and survive are then immune to the rarer and more fatal version of the disease, and can never catch greyscale again. (G.R.R.M.’s little ray of sunshine.) However, they are disabled for the rest of their lives, since parts of their skin are essentially stone. For adults the disease is always fatal, and often drives them insane towards the end.

To treat the disease, the Maesters recommend limes, mustard poultices, and scalding baths, which can help slow its progress. Others claim that cutting off infected limbs stops the spread of infection, but that isn’t always the case (oops). At least sufferers of this illness are no longer contagious after the spread of the growths stops.

Andromeda Strain (Michael Crichton,  The Andromeda Strain)

Michael Crichton’s sci-fi tale has been adapted for television twice, and yet the novel still manages to strike fear into the heart of anyone whose favorite apocalypse scenario is some sort of plague. Part of what makes this disease so realistic is the lovely fact that Crichton (like our Dr. Paralkar) was a medical doctor and had the scientific background to create a fictional disease with more than a touch of realism about it.

Essentially, this disease erodes the walls of blood vessels, triggering a coagulation response (and therefore clogging up your entire circulatory system) or causing cerebral hematomas (usually leading to dementia). The strain is always evolving, which makes it difficult for the scientists to fight, and it also happens to be extremely contagious, as most airborne illnesses are. There is hope, however: the disease can’t survive in the human body if the blood is too acidic or too alkaline. So load up on the citrus, kids.

Those are some of our favorite fictional diseases. Want lots more? Be sure to pick up a copy of “The Afflictions”! It’ll be on sale starting October 31, but you can preorder it now.

We’re fast gearing up for the official release of this fall’s novella: THE AFFLICTIONS, a fictional encyclopedia of archaic medicine written by a contemporary physician and scientist, Dr. Vikram Paralkar.

If you’re a fan of magical realism in general, or of beautifully written pseudo-reference works like the Book of Imaginary Beings or Invisible Cities, you don’t want to miss this! You can pre-order through Barnes & Noble or our website; the book will be shipped at the end of the month and there will be a launch party on November 5 at the Mütter Muesum of the College of Physicians:

AFFLICTIONS BOOK LAUNCH
Wednesday, November 5
7:00pm
Mütter Museum
19 South 22nd St
Philadelphia, PA

The event is free and open to the public, but please visit the Facebook event page and let us know if you plan to attend!

Can’t wait to see you there!

Another week, another essay on the struggling libraries of the digital age. This time it’s Slate.com:

[Once] a library without books was unthinkable. Now it seems almost inevitable. Like so many other time-honored institutions of intellectual and cultural life—publishing, journalism, and the university, to name a few—the library finds itself on a precipice at the dawn of a digital era. What are libraries for, if not storing and circulating books? With their hearts cut out, how can they survive?

Author Michael Agresta is hopeful. Communities can turn around the library’s decline, but only if they’re dedicated. Save the library, before it’s too late! At least the humans of New York have been making some headway in their battle to save the historic New York Public Library from destructive “renovations.” 

But here’s the line that’s interesting:

Supposedly forthcoming is a plan that will preserve the [New York Public Library’s] Snead stacks as part of a new circulating library, allowing patrons to see and experience the historic stack design, which has been off-limits to visitors up until now. This plan should satisfy preservationists, if not scholars hoping to keep the research collection intact.

That seems to be all the journalists think we can hope for from our nation’s greatest public libraries: they’ll keep on circulating the books that appeal to a majority of readers, but leave the scholars out in the cold.

It’s true that independent scholars, who aren’t professionally affiliated with a university but still do research, are a minority. It’s also true that the information in scholarly books is quieter and more reserved than the vast noise of the internet, and much less popular. But that information is also more deeply considered, better researched, more objective. Not all scholarly books are good; there are terrible ones. Lots of them. But there are also scholarly books that contain treasuries of unbiased knowledge about history, politics, culture, science, and so on — sometimes the culmination of decades of work from one lonely, brilliant human mind.

Why shouldn’t that priceless research be accessible to anyone who wants to look deeper than the maddening echo chamber of internet journalism? As a culture we stand to lose a great deal if no one outside of a hyper-professionalized academia has access to the conversation of people who are experts, as opposed to mere celebrities, in their fields. Libraries could even become a center for teaching the tools of research — how to pursue self-directed learning and curate your own reading throughout life. Because what do research skills mostly look like in the digital world? Step one: Google it. Step two: Look at Wikipedia. Step three: ??????? It’s that third step that we’ve lost, and that we need to recover.

It probably won’t make much of a splash in the world, when those research collections are quietly shuffled off and hidden in closets. But once they’re gone, we may have a much harder time finding our way out of the echo chamber.

Philadelphia is a great place to be a nerd.

The Philadelphia City Council recently made a great thing official and renamed North Third Street “Nerd Street,” with signage and everything. (Okay, for now the signs are just corrugated plastic tied to the posts of regular street signs with twisty ties, but we’re fairly sure the city’s planning something more permanent…?) 

The name recognizes the vibrant arts & technology corridor that runs along Third Street north of Market. And while there’s no shortage of technical innovators here, the neighborhood boasts a growing community of book lovers, too!

Lanternfish Press, which runs out of the Indy Hall coworking space, is happy to join other local purveyors of words such as Quirk Books, Brave New Worlds, The Book Trader, and Red Sofa Reading Series in calling Old City home. We’re also not far from other bookish locals like our friends at Brickbat Books and The Head and the Hand Press.

One thing we love about the city of Philadelphia is its sense of community. People don’t stay alone in their studio apartments with their laptops; they get out of the house, stroll outdoors in nice weather, hang out at the affordable local pubs and coffee shops, and do all kinds of interacting with their fellow humans IRL. There’s a thriving cafe culture here, and that’s a great thing for the arts.Thought & creativity don’t mature in isolation. They need an atmostphere of conversation, friendship, and the free exchange of ideas — face to face.

And we look forward to seeing the faces of our fellow Philadelphians at the N3rd Street Farmers’ Market, starting at the end of this month! We’ll join Red Sofa’s Hila Ratzabi and The Head and the Hand Press to sell books and poetry and to chat with YOU about books and poetry. Stop by and say hi!

Our tantalizing theme? SHERLOCK IN SPACE. Come and pick up your copies of The Legend of Sherlock Holmes (a curated collection of the original Victorian stories), The Asteroid Belt Almanac (short fiction about SPACE!), and the beautiful poetry poster Sedna in Space.

SHERLOCK IN SPACE
The Very First N3rd Street Farmers Market of 2014
May 20, 2014
2:00pm to 7:00pm