Sailing through Stories: Experiential Learning from the Works of Amitav Ghosh


Book Description

“Sailing through Stories: Experiential Learning from the Works of Amitav Ghosh” invites readers on a captivating journey through the literary tapestry woven by acclaimed author Amitav Ghosh. The book emphasizes experiential learning in literature, forging personal connections to narratives. It explores Ghosh’s works, including “The Shadow Lines,” “The Calcutta Chromosome,” “The Sea of Poppies,” “The Glass Palace,” “The Hungry Tide,” and the Ibis Trilogy – “River of Smoke” and “Flood of Fire.” Applying experiential learning methodologies, the book encourages active engagement with characters, themes, and historical contexts. Readers reflect on personal growth and connect narratives to global issues. The transformative power of literature shines through, leaving a profound appreciation for Ghosh’s masterpieces. An indispensable guide for literature enthusiasts, educators, and those seeking immersive understanding of Ghosh’s works.




Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh


Book Description

The prizewinning author of novels, nonfiction, and hybrid texts, Amitav Ghosh grew up in India and trained as an anthropologist. His works have been translated into over thirty languages. They cross and mix a number of genres, from science fiction to the historical novel, incorporating ethnohistory and travelogue and even recuperating dead languages. His subjects include climate change, postcolonial identities, translocation, migration, oceanic spaces, and the human interface with the environment. Part 1 of this volume discusses editions of Ghosh's works and the scholarship on Ghosh. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," present ideas for teaching his works through considerations of postcolonial feminism, historicity in the novels, environmentalism, language, sociopolitical conflict, genre, intersectional reading, and the ethics of colonized subjecthood. Guidance for teaching Ghosh in different contexts, such as general education, world literature, or single-author classes, is provided.




Sea of Poppies


Book Description

The first in an epic trilogy, Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies is "a remarkably rich saga . . . which has plenty of action and adventure à la Dumas, but moments also of Tolstoyan penetration--and a drop or two of Dickensian sentiment" (The Observer [London]). At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton. With a panorama of characters whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, Sea of Poppies is "a storm-tossed adventure worthy of Sir Walter Scott" (Vogue).




Flood of Fire


Book Description

A Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction Book of the Year A Guardian Best Book of the Year A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year The stunningly vibrant final novel in the bestselling Ibis Trilogy from Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire. It is 1839 and China has embargoed the trade of opium, yet too much is at stake in the lucrative business and the British Foreign Secretary has ordered the colonial government in India to assemble an expeditionary force for an attack to reinstate the trade. Among those consigned is Kesri Singh, a soldier in the army of the East India Company. He makes his way eastward on the Hind, a transport ship that will carry him from Bengal to Hong Kong. Along the way, many characters from the Ibis Trilogy come aboard, including Zachary Reid, a young American speculator in opium futures, and Shireen, the widow of an opium merchant whose mysterious death in China has compelled her to seek out his lost son. The Hind docks in Hong Kong just as war breaks out and opium is “pouring into the market like monsoon flood.” From Bombay to Calcutta, from naval engagements to the decks of a hospital ship, among embezzlement, profiteering, and espionage, Amitav Ghosh’s Flood of Fire charts a breathless course through the culminating moment of the British opium trade and vexed colonial history.




The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature


Book Description

This book provides a new map of American literature in the global era, analyzing the multiple meanings of transnationalism.




Gun Island


Book Description

Named a Best Book of Fall by Vulture, Chicago Review of Books and Amazon From the award-winning author of the bestselling epic Ibis trilogy comes a globetrotting, folkloric adventure novel about family and heritage Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one that turns Deen Datta’s world upside down. A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen’s eyes to the realities of growing up in today’s world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey that will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood, and about the world around him. Amitav Ghosh‘s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.




The Great Derangement


Book Description

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.




Ambiguity Machines


Book Description

Philip K. Dick Award finalist Praise for Vandana Singh: “A most promising and original young writer.”—Ursula K. Le Guin “Lovely! What a pleasure this book is . . . full of warmth, compassion, affection, high comedy and low.”—Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses “Vandana Singh’s radiant protagonist is a planet unto herself.”—Village Voice “Sweeping starscapes and daring cosmology that make Singh a worthy heir to Cordwainer Smith and Arthur C. Clarke.”—Chris Moriarty, Fantasy & Science Fiction “I’m looking forward to the collection . . . everything I’ve read has impressed me—the past and future visions in ‘Delhi’, the intensity of ‘Thirst’, the feeling of escape at the end of ‘The Tetrahedron’...” —Niall Harrison, Vector (British Science Fiction Association) “...the first writer of Indian origin to make a serious mark in the SF world ... she writes with such a beguiling touch of the strange.” —Nilanjana Roy, Business Standard In her first North American collection, Vandana Singh’s deep humanism interplays with her scientific background in stories that explore and celebrate this world and others and characters who are trying to make sense of the people they meet, what they see, and the challenges they face. An eleventh century poet wakes to find he is as an artificially intelligent companion on a starship. A woman of no account has the ability to look into the past. In "Requiem," a major new novella, a woman goes to Alaska to try and make sense of her aunt’s disappearance. Singh's stories have been performed on BBC radio, been finalists for the British SF Association award, selected for the Tiptree award honor list, and oft reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her dives deep into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within and with her unblinking clear vision she explores the ways we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.




River of Smoke


Book Description

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of Year A NPR Best Book of the Year In Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, the Ibis began its treacherous journey across the Indian Ocean, bound for the cane fields of Mauritius with a cargo of indentured servants. Now, in River of Smoke, the former slave ship flounders in the Bay of Bengal, caught in the midst of a deadly cyclone. The storm also threatens the clipper ship Anahita, groaning with the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for Canton. Meanwhile, the Redruth, a nursery ship, carries horticulturists determined to track down the priceless botanical treasures of China. All will converge in Canton's Fanqui-town, or Foreign Enclave, a powder keg awaiting a spark to ignite the Opium Wars. A spectacular adventure, but also a bold indictment of global avarice, River of Smoke is a consuming historical novel with powerful contemporary resonance.




The Circle of Reason


Book Description

A New York Times Notable Book: A policeman chases a falsely accused man on a wild journey around the world in this “utterly involving” novel (The Sunday Times). When eight-year-old Nachiketa Bose first arrives in the East Bengali village of Lalpukur, he receives the name Alu—potato—for the size and shape of his extraordinary head. His uncle Balaram, the local schoolmaster and phrenology enthusiast, sends Alu to apprentice as a weaver, and the boy soon surpasses the skill of his master. But when a tragic bombing leaves Alu suspected of terrorism, he flees across India to Bombay and the Arabian Sea, followed all the way by the dogged policeman—and avid ornithologist—Jyoti Das. From East Bengal to the Persian Gulf and North Africa, Amitav Ghosh’s wild and extraordinary novel “follows in the footsteps of magical realists like Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie” (The New York Times Book Review). “A novelist of dazzling ingenuity.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A Scheherezade effortlessly spinning tales within tales, the possessor of a strong narrative voice quite like no other.” —Newsday “Ghosh’s writing soars, producing electric images.” —The Baltimore Sun “A wonderful mix of magic and horror, wit and curiosity . . . Ghosh has really woven a fresh world for us to visit.” —Providence Sunday Journal