Sunday, August 2, 2026 at 11:30am
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability, at the level of literature, history, and politics, to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.
We will discuss the book, available for purchase or from your library.
Coming up in the series, all Sundays at 11:30am:
August 30: Means of Control by Byron Tau
On post-9/11 data collection, and how the hidden alliance of tech and government built the American surveillance state.
September 27: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici
On the witch hunts as capitalism’s violent birth, and the destruction of women’s autonomy and the commons.
