I was mesmerized by St. John Mandel's world off the grid, "civilization" taken out with a deadly virus, and the consequent loss of so much that we take for granted: electricity, transportation, communication, books, government, safety. In many ways, it's the world of pioneers (as a kid, stories of the past were my passion: brave girls on wagon trains or living in danger on the frontier). The characters here must likewise rely upon their own creativity, but in this world, there is still the memory of electrification, travel, global connectivity, history, information, suffusing that primitive existence with a painful nostalgia. The characters are well-drawn--artists and actors, along with a few psychopaths--and the plot moves right along. But mostly, this book has haunted me: how the loss of "civilization" is just one deadly virus or other catastrophe away. And what that would mean.
'Best novel. The big one . . . stands above all the others' - George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones
Now an HBO Max original TV series
The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.
One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in…
This book really blew me away. First of all, I'm a gardener and a plant lover--and I talk to my plants, too. But Schlanger's principled, passionate pursuit of the contemporary scientific understanding of "plant consciousness" was mind-shattering. She's an excellent writer and her research fully persuasive. But even more, she offers a glimpse of a completely revolutionary way of seeing the world we inhabit. It's a clear instance of Thomas Kuhn's notion of scientific revolution--or the 100th monkey. Once we see what these scientists are seeing, everything will change. Meanwhile, I'll never prune a rose or cut the grass without hearing a little squeak of pain!
"teeming with fascinating and enlightening insights" Observer
A narrative investigation into the new science of plant intelligence and sentience, from National Association of Science Writers Award winner and Livingston Award finalist Zoe Schlanger.
Look at the green organism across the room or through the window: the potted plant, or the grass or a tree. Think how a life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants have come up with some of the most creative methods for surviving of any living thing - us included. Many are so ingenious that they…
Having been a Fulbright scholar back in the 90s in Chile, just after the fall of Pinochet, I was excited to become reacquainted with this alluring and complex country. Scott-Stokes is an engaging writer and an a thoughtful observer and, though a Brit, she spent fifteen years in Chile raising a family and trying to live as a Chilean. As her essays suggest, she could never escape being an immigrant (an interesting experience and perspective in itself), but she has some very insightful reflections on the cultural and political undercurrents that have made this "neo-liberal" global success a place of relentless paucity and struggle for its people. Scott-Stokes is also an adventurer. An earlier book chronicled her journey as the first woman to traverse the length of the Amazon alone. And so her portraits of the breath-taking beauty and variety of this pencil of a country includes some rather remarkable travelogues as well. I loved being transported back to this extraordinary land--even though the reports are sobering indeed.
Chile is 4,300 kilometers long but never more than 350 kilometers wide, lined by the Andes to the east and the Pacific to the west, with the Pan-American Highway giving you just two choices: north or south. Traveling along that dusty road takes you to both the driest desert on earth and to impenetrable cloud forests barring the way to Patagonian ice fields. Here is the true magnet of this jagged knife-edge of a country: the unique landscape born of its geography and the gorgeous plant and animal life. Few things are more thrilling than climbing the coastal mountains to…
Co-edited with Teresa Toulouse, "Sweet Spots" is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that explores the “in-between-ness” of New Orleans, this most “in-between” of North American cities: the “northernmost Caribbean city”; a multi-cultural port central to the homogeneous South; a city built on slavery and African culture that flouts European faux-royalty in its famous carnival; a thin sliver of land in constant danger of sliding under the sea. The essays examine elements of the city’s architecture, geography, sociology, art, music and literature, teasing out how its “interstitiality” defines its unique place in the cultural imagination.
