Debut Collection available Now

"Virology is a brilliant book, both playful and serious, showing us all how viruses live with us, as we live with them. Drawing on queer theory, Osmundson offers a way of understanding care in the midst of anguish and anxiety as well as desire and hope. The viral world is the ordinary world of life and death, of caring for one another in our vulnerability and persistence. This book explains the science of virology, offering a compassionate education for all of us disoriented in pandemic times. This book is queer pedagogy at its best: non-patronizing, thoroughly smart, and full of urgent and caring knowledge that beckons us to get closer again with caution and passion."

– Judith Butler

“I have absolutely no idea how Osmundson made a book this timely, this timeless, this packed with contents and styles we aren’t supposed to experience in one text. Virology is devastating in its soulful brilliance. Rigor just became cool as fuck and pleasurable again.”

—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“To read Joseph Osmundson’s mind at work is such a pleasure. The tendrils of Virology go deep: to the pandemic, queerness, memes, futurity, and what it means to hold both love and despair, to live awake to both the world’s beauty and its harm. This is a profoundly necessary, urgently of-the-moment collection, one I’ll keep thinking about for a long time to come.”

—Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body

“The essays in Virology are beyond impressive. This is precision work, cutting and thoughtful, done with the deft hand of a wildly skilled writer. Osmundson has given us something precious with this important collection. It is a tribute to humanity. It is an ode to life.”

—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth

“Joseph Osmundson’s Virology is an incisive look at our relationship to earth’s most plentiful life form—how we live with viruses and how viruses live in and through us. But more than this, it is a compelling examination of the tension between avoidance and exposure, safety and risk, preservation of the self and openness to evolution and change. This book is a potent medicine for our times.”

—Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings

“Joseph Osmundson’s Virology made me gay for viruses. Seriously. Virology is a tour de force that uses queer theory to teach us about the science of viruses. Along the way, we are forced to reckon with the reality that far from being villainous little creatures, viruses are actually fascinating almost-life forms. Virology brilliantly revises the frameworks we use to talk about life in a world filled with viruses and reminds us that our relationship with science and scientific phenomena is always social.”

—Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of The Disordered Cosmos

“Inquisitive, bold, and lyrical, Virology offers a captivating and very queer look at our present moment through the lens of someone who knows more than most of us about the science behind our shared catastrophe.”

—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

“Luckily, we have Joseph Osmundson—an actual virologist— who writes with elegance and insight about the intersection of the real and the metaphorical, moving through topics like the legacy of HIV/AIDS, the long-term impact of COVID variants, and the effects of a prolonged pandemic on our systems of power. This is very much a book of our times.”

—Literary Hub

“Superb essay collection… Original and bubbling with curiosity, this is a masterful achievement.”

– Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)