In celebration of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Disease and Inequality Collide by Steven W. Thrasher, the author is offering a series of portraits by artist Molly Crabapple to one lucky winner.

This grand prize includes five signed prints depicting the following characters from the movie Parasite, which features prominently in Chapter 3: Parasite (Capitalism):

• Ki-woo ("Kevin")
• Ki-jung ("Jessica")
• Ki-taek ("Mr. Kim")
• Chung-sook ("Mrs. Kim")
• Moon-gwang

Sign up below to be entered to win these beautiful portraits, then pick up your copy of The Viral Underclass at your favorite bookstore!

About the Book

From preeminent LGBTQ scholar, social critic, and journalist Steven W. Thrasher comes a powerful and crucial exploration of one of the most pressing issues of our times: how viruses expose the fault lines of society.

Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone.

Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, The Viral Underclass helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.

About the Author

STEVEN W. THRASHER, PhD holds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair at Northwestern University's Medill School, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus on LGBTQ research. He is also a faculty member of Northwestern’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. His writing has been widely published by The New York Times, Guardian, Nation, Journal of American History, Esquire, BuzzFeed News and Scientific American. A recipient of grants from the Ford and Sloan foundations, Dr. Thrasher was named one of the 100 most influential and impactful people of 2019 by Out magazine. He holds a PhD in American Studies and divides his time between Chicago and New York. The Viral Underclass is his first book.

About the Artist

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer whose inspirations include Diego Rivera and Goya’s The Disasters of War. She is the author of Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham, which was a NY Times Notable Book and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award. Her memoir, Drawing Blood, received global praise and attention. Her animated films have been nominated for three Emmys, and won an Edward R. Murrow Award.

Crabapple’s reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. She was the 2019 artist-in-residence at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2019, and a New America fellow in 2020. She currently is a Puffin Fellow at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

She got her start as a journalist sketching the frontlines of Occupy Wall Street, before covering, with words and art, Lebanese snipers, labor struggles in Abu Dhabi, Guantanamo Bay, the US border, America prisoners, Greek refugee camps, and the ravages of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. She once confronted Donald Trump in Dubai about exploitation of the workers building his golf courses. As an award-winning animator, she has pioneered a new genre of live-illustrated explainer journalism, collaborating with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Jay Z, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and The ACLU. Her animations are on permanent display at The Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

She has spoken to audiences around the world, from Jakarta to Beirut, Sao Paolo to Ramallah, Mumbai to Paris, at universities including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and The London School of Economics, and at museums including The Brooklyn Museum and The Guggenheim. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress, and the New York Historical Society.