Float started out as a comedy of manners set in a coastal Maine town, but the more I learned about fishing and the oceans, the more the characters began to struggle with questions about their responsibility to the natural world. By the time I was finished, Float had morphed into a dark comedy about plastic in the ocean, which is not just unsightly and a killer of sea animals, it is made from fossil fuels. I have stayed active in the fight against plastics ever since, and have participated in a number of programs on the intersection of the arts and climate science.
Parable of the Sower, written way back in 1993, is set in a 2024 California ravaged by fires, authoritarianism, gun violence, and other fallout from a rapidly changing planet. This novel pulls it all together, connecting the dots of climate change, social injustice, and race and gender disparities. Butler, a black female writer, and the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur fellowship, was eerily prescient, predicting not just the worldwide rise of fascism, but even our high-tech world, where virtual reality is used as recreational escapism. Her female protagonist wrestles with how to create a safer and more equitable future, which might not be possible on this planet. After you read this, read the sequel, Parable of the Talents.
The extraordinary, prescient NEW YORK TIMES-bestselling novel.
'If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true. This is what makes Parable of the Sower even more impressive than it was when first published' GLORIA STEINEM
'Unnervingly prescient and wise' YAA GYASI
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We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.
America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to…
I like a good satire and I love Ian McEwan. Set in academia, Professor Beard, with his Nobel prize in physics clutched to his chest, is offended by the idea that art might be as good a tool for curing a sick planet as his analytical facts. For all his scientific knowledge, he fails to understand that art has power. His younger colleague tries his best, explaining how images created by art bypass the modern cerebral cortex and go straight to our ancient limbic brain which controls memory and emotion, the part of the brain where we process value judgments, judgments that exert a strong influence on our behavior. This book makes the case for climate change as an important subject in literature, art, and music, because we need to touch hearts before we can create change. And it’s pretty funny on top of it.
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her.
When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world…
Noam Chomsky has been praised by the likes of Bono and Hugo Chávez and attacked by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Alan Dershowitz. Groundbreaking linguist and outspoken political dissenter—voted “most important public intellectual in the world today” in a 2005 magazine poll—Chomsky inspires fanatical devotion and fierce vituperation.
Every “best of” list should have at least one book in translation, so I give you The Rings of Saturn by the German writer W. G. Sebald. This amazing genre-bending book is set in England and is called a novel, but it reads more like a history book, a geography textbook, and a travelogue combined in one walker’s head. It is a moving contemplation on the deep past and inner workings of the planet and the effects of humans on the natural landscape. Go, take the long walk with this brilliant mind and return with an altered and educated perspective, because the more we know about the place of humans in the world, the greater our insight into how we ought to live our lives.
The Rings of Saturn-with its curious archive of photographs-records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an…
I love it when a book of fiction makes an effort to connect us to the inner lives of non-human beings, and in the case of The Overstory, it is trees. We have evolved with them, and as Powers illustrates in this novel, we can’t live without them. They capture the carbon we have ill-advisedly released into the atmosphere. Trees make the air breathable and provide the shade to keep the planet cool enough for human survival, but yet we insist on destroying them in the name of progress. As with most of the natural world, they’d be better off without us, one way or another. As Powers reminds us, Nature always bats last. His characters put their lives on the line in order to save not just the trees, but ourselves. This winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019 is a beautiful call to activism.
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…
This book is a literary historical novel. It is set in Britain immediately after World War II, when people – gay, straight, young, and old - are struggling to get back on track with their lives, including their love lives. Because of the turmoil of the times, the number of…
Not all fiction comes in the form of a novel. The most innovative writing is often found in short fiction, so I’m also going to recommend Fire & Water, an anthology of climate fiction. There are 17 stories from around the world (disclosure: including one of my own) - from a Sámi woman who studies Alaska fish populations to a teenager living through a permanent drought in Australia - all wrestling with what humans have done to the planet and what it means for the survival of our species. These stories do what literature does best, helping us grasp complex topics through use of narrative and image as we teeter on the unknown. After reading this wide range of voices, you will feel a little less alone in a challenging world.
Fiction. A Sámi woman studying Alaska fish populations sees our past and future through their present signs of stress and her ancestral knowledge. A teenager faces a permanent drought in Australia and her own sexual desire. An unemployed man in Wisconsin marvels as a motley parade of animals makes his trailer their portal to a world untrammeled by humans. Featuring short fiction from authors around the globe; FIRE & WATER: STORIES FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE takes readers on a rare journey through the physical and emotional landscape of the climate crisis--not in the future; but today. By turns frightening; confusing; and…
Float is a dark satire of financial desperation, conceptual art, and the plight of a plastics-filled ocean. This environmentally smart novel follows Duncan Leland, owner of a Maine dehyde plant that turns fish waste into fertilizer, as he struggles to stay afloat while navigating the murky waters between him and his estranged wife, a chef who is experimental to the point of danger, a racing-obsessed mother, a plant supervisor who puts the needs of marine life over the business, and a shady partner who values the business more than Duncan’s life.
When Jennifer Shea married Russel Redmond, they made a decision to spend their honeymoon at sea, sailing in Mexico. The voyage tested their new relationship, not just through rocky waters and unexpected weather, but in all the ways that living on a twenty-six-foot sailboat make one reconsider what's truly important.…
The Pact is a contemporary fiction novel about Australian sisters, Samantha and Annie, who are doubles tennis champions. This story amplifies the usual sibling issues and explores their professional partnership and personal relationships – similarities, differences, motivation, competition, abandonment, and grief – and how they each respond to the stress…
