Wild Fictions

"Wild Fictions brings together twenty-five years of Amitav Ghosh's writing on literature and language, climate change and the environment, travel, and historical lives. Taken together, Ghosh's essays form a constellation of the themes central to his fiction and nonfiction over the past two decades: imperialism and decolonization, climate change, and the stories of ordinary individuals making lives amid these historical forces. Among the highlights are essays that revisit Ghosh's time as an aspiring writer and anthropologist in an Egyptian village in the early 1980s, that recover writings by Indian veterans of World War I, and that recount the lives of the multiethnic crewmen-the laskars-who worked the sailing ships of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and populate Ghosh's most successful novels. Included as well are Ghosh's afterthoughts on his highly influential book The Great Derangement and a rich correspondence with historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. Throughout, the spirit of these pieces reflects what Ghosh calls his xenophilia-an affinity for strangers-and a wish to reclaim a cosmopolitanism that flourished in the Global South before it was interrupted by colonialism"--

Amitav Ghosh is a novelist and essayist whose many books include the acclaimed Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire), Gun Island, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, and The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, the latter two also published by the University of Chicago Press.