Note: As we come up on the 50th Anniversary of the Pentagon Papers, and with the recent release of the Afghanistan Papers, we felt it was timely to look back at the conflict in Vietnam. Over the next month, I am doing an examination of several Vietnam-era historical works that examine both sides of the…
Category: Longreads
Climate Change Reading Suggestions In Parts One and Two of this climate change and literature series I explored whether climate change is well-represented in fiction. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues that modern literary fiction does not adequately represent climate change issues. He contends that we have been suffering from a lack of cultural…
Part One of this series outlined a brief history of climate change and charted how the numbers of non-fiction climate change publications have changed over time. The enormous spatial and temporal scope of climate change has led to a cultural “disbelief” and “failure of imagination” which seems to affect the ways in which we tell…
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” – Jessamyn West (To See the Dream, 1956) Introduction “In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first…