Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Climate change and environment. The Great uprooting : migration and displacement in an age of planetary crisis -- Storm of consequences -- Cyclone Nargis -- Folly in the Sundarbans? -- The town by the sea -- A tragic predicament -- Witnesses. Santanu Das and the First World War -- Abhi le Baghdad -- At 'home and ht eworld' in Iraq, 1915-1917 -- Shared sorrows : Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-Ain, 1916-1918 -- Of Fanas and forecastles : the Indian Ocean and some lost languages of the Age of Sail -- Worless pasts : the Indian exodus from Burma and the writing of The glass palace -- Travel and discovery. Confessions of a xenophile -- The mountains are high and the emperor is far away -- The Spice Islands -- Narratives. The well-travelled banyan -- 11 September 2001 -- Wild fictions -- Conversations. Provincializing Europe : a correspondence -- Imperial denial -- Storytelling and hte spectrum of the past -- Shashi Tharoor's An era of darkness -- Priya Satia's Time's monster -- Presentations. The making of In an antique land : India, Egypt and the Cairo Geniza -- Computers and spinning wheels -- The way of A.K. Ramanujan.

"Wild Fictions brings together twenty-five years of Amitav Ghosh's writing on literature and language, climate change and the environment, travel, and historical lives. Taken together, Ghosh's essays form a constellation of the themes central to his fiction and nonfiction over the past two decades: imperialism and decolonization, climate change, and the stories of ordinary individuals making lives amid these historical forces. Among the highlights are essays that revisit Ghosh's time as an aspiring writer and anthropologist in an Egyptian village in the early 1980s, that recover writings by Indian veterans of World War I, and that recount the lives of the multiethnic crewmen-the laskars-who worked the sailing ships of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and populate Ghosh's most successful novels. Included as well are Ghosh's afterthoughts on his highly influential book The Great Derangement and a rich correspondence with historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. Throughout, the spirit of these pieces reflects what Ghosh calls his xenophilia-an affinity for strangers-and a wish to reclaim a cosmopolitanism that flourished in the Global South before it was interrupted by colonialism"--