The Great Derangement

will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement

If I, as a novelist, choose to use brand names as elements in the depiction of character, do I not need to ask myself about the degree to which this makes me complicit in the manipulations of the marketplace

have come to be convinced that the discrepancy is not the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction

Yet, it is a striking fact that when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside of fiction.

the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel

the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth

that they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in

Here even a child will begin a story about his grandmother with the words: ‘in those days the river wasn’t here and the village was not where it is . . .’”

there is no difference between the without and the within; between using and being used

Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. To recognize, then, is not the same as an initial introduction. Nor does recognition require an exchange of words: more often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment