“Brilliant, insightful, unceasingly compelling: The Pandemic Archives was one of the year’s outstanding reads for me. It’s a book with an incessant drive and an intense, clear-sighted inquisitiveness that sifts as eagerly through letters, diaries and medical records as it pores over poems, novels and plays, all from a range of historical periods that have seen themselves ravaged by pandemics. Stueland unfolds the history for us and brings it to life, a feat in itself – but equally important is how relevant The Pandemic Archives is to the ways in which we can understand the crisis of our own times, a relevance that grows with every page.”
Karl Ove Knausgård

“Stueland doesn’t try to imagine what the past what like, he sits stooped over literary works, medical dissertations and political pamphlets, while reflecting and analysing. In this way he tries to understand why people understood pandemics completely differently in earlier times than we do now. He is looking for what’s strange and sometimes incomprehensible about the past. Everything we can easily brush off as superstition or medical and religious delusions. This is quite simply an impressive work. For Stueland has a unique ability to portray the history of plague and cholera with reference to surprising observations”
Marius Wulffsberg, Dagbladet

“After many volumes of corona literature, we finally get a historically based and intellectually ambitious book about contagion and pandemics. Stueland draws long historical lines, investigating how literature can help us understand what a pandemic actually is, and how we should react to it and move on. This is outstanding and ambitious essay writing that shows how culture and society is woven tightly together, and that culture really can provide instruments for reflection”
Kjetil Røed, Vårt Land, Best Books of 2021

“A roadmap through pandemics. Espen Stueland has written a complex, fascinating work about the history, culture and curse of contagious disease … captivating, surprising and ceaselessly interesting … More than 400 footnotes and a bibliography of almost 20 pages says a lot. In other words, it’s the author’s tireless curiosity and desire to understand that drives this book, together with an almost peerless gift for imparting knowledge … Whether we are in the middle or near the end of our own pandemic; there will surely be almost certainly be others and in The Pandemic Archives there are references to other works that might help us be prepared. As individuals and as a society. There can hardly be a stronger recommendation than that.”
Leif Ekle, NRK bok

“As Christmas approaches with both pandemic and gingerbread, there is comfort to be found in a book that shows that the handling of pandemics was no better in the past … a compelling book about pandemics in literature … You never quite know where the author will go in the next section … Those who like the playful kind of essay writing, where the author’s curiosity is the organizing principle, will be delighted. There’s an impressive amount of research behind it, and the level of details in the text is almost madness”
Mari Grydeland, Aftenposten

“Enormously interesting … a hugely topical non-fiction book that examines pandemics in history, with a special focus on the Black Death, cholera and corona.”
Jannicke Totland, Framtida

“Espen Stueland shows the patient reader that a pandemic can change the premises for how we think about freedom”
Live Lundh, Morgenbladet