Wild Fictions Essays on Literature, Empire, and the Environment

About this book

From the 2025 recipient of the Pak Kyongni Prize, often referred to as Korea's Nobel Prize in Literature.

A collection of essays on themes central to Ghosh's work: imperialism and decolonisation, climate change, and the stories of ordinary people making lives amid these historical forces. Wild Fictions brings together Amitav Ghosh's extraordinary writings on subjects that have obsessed him over the last twenty-five years: literature and language; climate change and the environment; and human lives, travel, and discoveries. Threaded throughout the collection are his reflections on the spaces that we inhabit and how we occupy them. From the significance of the commodification of the clove to the diversity of the mangrove forests in Bengal and the radical fluidity of multilingualism, Wild Fictions is a powerful refutation of imperial violence, a fascinating exploration of the fictions we weave to absorb history, and a reminder of the importance of sensitivity and empathy.

With the combination of moral passion, intellectual curiosity, and literary elegance that defines his writing, Ghosh makes readers understand the world in new and urgent ways. Together, the pieces in Wild Fictions chart a course that allows us to heal our relationships and restore the delicate balance with the volatile landscapes to which we all belong.

Contents

Introduction

Climate Change and Environment
One / The Great Uprooting: Migration and Displacement in an Age of Planetary Crisis
Two / Storm of Consequences
Three / Cyclone Nargis
Four / Folly in the Sundarbans?
Five / The Town by the Sea
Six / A Tragic Predicament

Witnesses
Seven / Santanu Das and the First World War
Eight / Abhi Le Baghdad
Nine / At ‘Home and the World’ in Iraq, 1915–17
Ten / Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the Prison Camps of Ras al-’Ain, 1916–18
Eleven / Of Fanás and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail
Twelve / Wordless Pasts: The Indian Exodus from Burma and the Writing of The Glass Palace

Travel and Discovery
Thirteen / Confessions of a Xenophile
Fourteen / The Mountains Are High and the Emperor Is Far Away
Fifteen / The Spice Islands

Narratives
Sixteen / The Well-Travelled Banyan
Seventeen / 11 September 2001
Eighteen / Wild Fictions

Conversations
Nineteen / Provincializing Europe: A Correspondence
Twenty / Imperial Denial
Twenty-one / Storytelling and the Spectrum of the Past
Twenty-two / Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness
Twenty-three / Priya Satia’s Time’s Monster

Presentations
Twenty-four / The Making of In an Antique Land: India, Egypt and the Cairo Geniza
Twenty-five / Computers and Spinning Wheels
Twenty-six / The Way of A.K. Ramanujan

Afterword
Notes
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

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.