The End of Imagination

by Arundhati Roy

Overview

The End of Imagination brings together five of Arundhati Roy's acclaimed books of essays into one comprehensive volume for the first time and features a new introduction by the author.

This new collection begins with her pathbreaking book The Cost of Living—published soon after she won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things—in which she forcefully condemned India’s nuclear tests and its construction of enormous dam projects that continue to displace countless people from their homes and communities. The End of Imagination also includes her nonfiction works Power Politics, War Talk, Public Power in the Age of Empire, and An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, which include her widely circulated and inspiring writings on the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the need to confront corporate power, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions globally.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608466191
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	09/06/2016
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Arundhati Roy studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. The novel has been translated into forty languages worldwide. She has written several non-fiction books, including Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers and Capitalism: A Ghost Story, published by Haymarket Books.

Table of Contents

My Seditious Heart: An Unfinished Diary of Nowadays 1

Map of India 36

Glossary 37

Part I

1 The End of Imagination 45

2 Democracy: Who Is She When She's at Home? 65

3 When the Saints Go Marching Out: The Strange Fate of Martin, Mohandas, and Mandela 81

4 In Memory of Shankar Guha Niyogi 87

5 How Deep Shall We Dig? 91

Part II

6 The Greater Common Good 107

7 Power Politics: The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin 151

8 The Ladies Have Feelings, So …: Shall We Leave It to the Experts? 177

9 On Citizens' Rights to Express Dissent 195

10 Ahimsa (Nonviolent Resistance) 205

Part III

11 The Algebra of Infinite Justice 211

12 War Is Peace 221

13 War Talk: Summer Games with Nuclear Bombs 233

14 Come September 237

15 An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire 253

16 The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky 263

17 Confronting Empire 277

18 Peace Is War: The Collateral Damage of Breaking News 283

19 Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free) 295

20 Du Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving? 311

21 Public Power in the Age of Empire 319

Notes 343

Sources 383

Index 387

Editorial Reviews

"Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness. And in these extraordinary essays—which are clarions for justice, for witness, for a true humanity—Roy is at her absolute best.”
—Junot Díaz

"Her incomparable divining rod picks up the cries of the despised and the oppressed in the most remote corners of the globe; it even picks up the cries of rivers and fish. With an unfailing charm and wit that makes her writing constantly enlivening to read, her analysis of our grotesque world is savagely clear, and yet her anger never obscures her awareness that beauty, joy, and pleasure can potentially be part of the life of human beings."
—Wallace Shawn


Praise for Arundhati Roy:

"Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays."
—Howard Zinn

“Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time.”
—Naomi Klein

"The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart."
—Alice Walker

"Arundhati Roy calls for 'factual precision' alongside of the 'real precision of poetry.' Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach."
—Noam Chomsky

"The notion of Democracy and the pleading for human compassion first came together in Sophocles and the Greek tragedies. More than two thousand years later we live under an economic world tyranny of unprecedented brutality, which depends upon the systematic abuse of words like Democracy or Progress. Arundhati Roy, the direct descendant of Antigone, resists and denounces all tyrannies, pleads for their victims, and unflinchingly questions the tragic. Reflect with her on the answers she receives from the political world today."
—John Berger

“[Roy is] an electrifying political essayist... So fluent is her prose, so keen her understanding of global politics, and so resonant her objections to nuclear weapons, assaults against the environment, and the endless suffering of the poor that her essays are as uplifting as they are galvanizing.”
—Booklist

“[Arundhati Roy is] India's most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence.”
—The New York Times

"The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating."
—The New York Times Book Review


"Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness. And in these extraordinary essays—which are clarions for justice, for witness, for a true humanity—Roy is at her absolute best.”
—Junot Díaz

"Her incomparable divining rod picks up the cries of the despised and the oppressed in the most remote corners of the globe; it even picks up the cries of rivers and fish. With an unfailing charm and wit that makes her writing constantly enlivening to read, her analysis of our grotesque world is savagely clear, and yet her anger never obscures her awareness that beauty, joy, and pleasure can potentially be part of the life of human beings."
—Wallace Shawn


Praise for Arundhati Roy:

"Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays."
—Howard Zinn

“Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time.”
—Naomi Klein

"The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart."
—Alice Walker

"Arundhati Roy calls for 'factual precision' alongside of the 'real precision of poetry.' Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach."
—Noam Chomsky

"The notion of Democracy and the pleading for human compassion first came together in Sophocles and the Greek tragedies. More than two thousand years later we live under an economic world tyranny of unprecedented brutality, which depends upon the systematic abuse of words like Democracy or Progress. Arundhati Roy, the direct descendant of Antigone, resists and denounces all tyrannies, pleads for their victims, and unflinchingly questions the tragic. Reflect with her on the answers she receives from the political world today."
—John Berger

“[Roy is] an electrifying political essayist... So fluent is her prose, so keen her understanding of global politics, and so resonant her objections to nuclear weapons, assaults against the environment, and the endless suffering of the poor that her essays are as uplifting as they are galvanizing.”
—Booklist

“[Arundhati Roy is] India's most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence.”
—The New York Times

"The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating."
—The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher