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Amitav Ghosh: 'The World Of Fact Is Outrunning The World Of Fiction'

Ghosh's latest book, Gun Island, is a modern retelling of a Bengali myth. He believes old legends have a lot to teach us about how to think about the catastrophic effects of climate change.
Source: Farrar Straus & Giroux

In 2016, Amitav Ghosh was working on his novel Gun Island, and imagined a scene in which a wildfire was advancing toward a Los Angeles museum. About six months later, that scenario played out in real life, as the Skirball fire burned near The Getty Center in December 2017. Ghosh says he felt "completely shaken."

"To see things that you've seen in your mind sort of playing out in real life —

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