Incendiary Circumstances

A journalist who “illuminates the human drama behind the headlines” writes about today’s dramatic events, from terrorist attacks to tsunamis (Publishers Weekly). “An uncannily honest writer,” Amitav Ghosh has published firsthand accounts of pivotal world events in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and the New Yorker (The New York Times Book Review). This volume brings together the finest of these pieces, chronicling the turmoil of our times. Incendiary Circumstances begins with Ghosh’s arrival in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands just days after the devastation of the 2005 tsunami. We then travel back to September 11, 2001, as Ghosh retrieves his young daughter from school, sick with the knowledge that she must witness the kind of firestorm that has been in the background of his life since childhood. In his travels, Ghosh has stood on an icy mountaintop on the contested border between India and Pakistan; interviewed Pol Pot’s sister-in-law in Cambodia; shared the elation of Egyptians when Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize; and stood with his threatened Sikh neighbors through the riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination. In these pieces, he offers an up-close look at an era defined by the ravages of politics and nature. “Ghosh is the perfect chronicler of an increasingly globalized world . . . Reading [him] is a mind-expanding experience. Once you’ve finished this book, you’re very likely to press it into your friends’ hands and beg them to read it as well.” —Sunday Oregonian

A tragicomic open letter to Osama Bin Laden from a young London woman whose husband and son are killed in a terrorist attack on a soccer stadium.

Set in a lushly drawn world inspired by Inquisition Spain, Zoraida Córdova's fantasy is an epic tale of love and revenge perfect for fans of Sabaa Tahir and Sarah J. Maas. As a memory thief, the rarest and most feared of the magical Moria, Renata was used by the crown to carry out the King's Wrath, a siege that resulted in the deaths of thousands of her own people. Now Renata is one of the Whispers, rebel spies working against the crown. The Whispers may have rescued Renata years ago, but she cannot escape their mistrust and hatred—or the overpowering memories of the hundreds of souls she drained during her time in the palace. When Dez, the commander of her unit—and the boy she's grown to love—is taken captive by the notorious Principe Dorado, Renata must return to Andalucia and complete Dez's top secret mission herself. But as Renata grows more deeply embedded in the politics of the royal court, she uncovers a secret in her past that could change the fate of the entire kingdom—and end the war that has cost her everything.

Highlighting literature and philosophy's potential impact on economics, health care, bioethics, public policy and theology, this book analyses the heuristic value of fiction. It alerts us to how we risk succumbing to the deceptions of fiction in our everyday lives, because fictional representations constantly feign to be of the real and claim a reality of their own. Philosophy and literature disclose how the substantive sphere of social, economic and medical practice is sometimes driven and shaped by the affect-ridden and subjective. Analysing a wide range of literature-from Augustine, Shakespeare, Spinoza and Deleuze to Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Philip Roth, W. G. Sebald and Jonathan Littell-Michael Mack rethinks ethical attitudes towards the long or eternal life. In so doing he shows how philosophy and literature turn representation against itself to expose the hollowness of theologically grand concepts that govern our secular approach towards ethics, economics and medicine. Philosophy and literature help us resist our current infatuation with numbers and the numerical and contribute towards a future politics that is at once singular and diverse.

One of the most magnetic and esteemed poets in today’s literary landscape, Patricia Smith fearlessly confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of mothers in her compelling new collection, Incendiary Art. She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the "dark magicians," and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language— "her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses—one by one / by one she wrecks the casket’s spray. It’s how she / mourns—a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns"— as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America’s most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history.

The Ecology of Modernism explores the unexpected absence of an environmental ethic in American modernist and avant-garde poetics, given its keen concern with an environmental aesthetic, and explains why American modernism was never green. Examining the relationships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial development, and pollution, Joshua Schuster posits that the curious failure of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethnic was a deliberate choice and not an inadvertent omission.

Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction shows the path to secularization in the modern novel in comparative perspective. Writers as diverse as George Eliot, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Taslima Nasrin, and James Wood, have all struggled with religious orthodoxy in their personal lives, and are some of the most important and representative "secular" writers in the modern world canon. But their novels, which are far more than mere anti-religious manifestos, directly reflect the continued power of religious communities and institutions in the modern world. While religion is in a very real sense displaced from epistemological centrality in modernity, all of these writers suggest that religious texts, rituals, and communities have a force that is, in George Eliot's words, “still throbbing” in modern life. In a series of close readings, Literary Secularism argues that the intimate, often deeply ambivalent representation of religion is a key feature of modern writing and is central to the larger intellectual and historical project of modernity. "Literary Secularism" is then a complex literary ethos, which impinges as much on style, language, and novelistic form as on theme. The close readings here of novels such as George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Rabindranath Tagore's Gora, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses all hinge on the ambiguity of religious and secular discourses. In some cases, the ambiguity is expressed through the affective and embodied experience of the protagonists, whose private subjectivity often conflicts with their public identities. The conflict between present and private is also explored in a dedicated chapter on secularism and feminism in India, as well as with regard to the global crisis of secularism that has emerged following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. While the particular experiences of the various narratives vary somewhat from author to author, all of the authors in this study are interested in defining a way of being secular that no sociological or ideological formula can fully describe. Correspondingly, while works of literature are certainly artifacts marking key moments in the history of secularisation, literature by itself doesn't produce secularism in either the cultural or the political context. In arguing for the "literary" as a historically-specific social and cultural mode of secularity, Literary Secularism offers a unique perspective on the problem of secularisation that may be of interest to fields such as literary criticism, religious studies, the sociology of religion, and polticial theory.