Building from his acclaimed anthology Tales of Two Americas beloved writer and editor John
Freeman draws together some of our greatest writers from around the world to help us see how
the environmental crisis is hitting some of the most vulnerable communities where they live. In
the past five years John Freeman previously editor of Granta has launched a celebrated
international literary magazine Freeman's and compiled two acclaimed anthologies that deal
with income inequality as it is experienced first in New York and then throughout the United
States. In the course of this work one major theme has come up repeatedly: how climate change
is making already dire inequalities much worse devastating further the already devastated. The
effects of global warming are especially disruptive in less well-off nations sending refugees
to the US and elsewhere in the wealthier world where they often encounter the problems that
perennially face outsiders: lack of access to education health care decent housing
employment and even basic nutrition. But the problems of climate change are not restricted to
those from the less developed world. American citizens are suffering too as the stories of
distress resulting from recent hurricanes testify: People who can't sell their home because the
building is on a flood plain people who get displaced and cannot find work and more. And this
doesn't even take on board the situation in much of the Caribbean or south of the Rio Grande
in Mexico and Central America. Galvanized by his conversations with writers and activists
around the world Freeman has engaged with some of today's most eloquent writers many of whom
hail from the places under the most acute stress. The response has been extraordinary: a
literary all-points bulletin of fiction essays poems and reportage. Margaret Atwood conjures
with a dystopian future in three remarkable poems. Lauren Groff takes us to Florida Edwidge
Danticat to Haiti Tahmima Anam to Bangladesh. Eka Kurniawan takes us to Indonesia and Chinelo
Okparanta to Nigeria. As the anthology unfolds clichés fall away and we are brought closer to
the real human truth of what is happening to our world and the dystopia to which we are
heading. These are news stories with the emphasis on story about events that should be found
in the headlines but often are not about the most important crisis of our times.
