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“The pandemic shows we’re capable of drastic change. It’s time to stop telling ourselves we can’t do the same to save the planet.”

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Tales of Two Planets is not soothing. It is not simple or stable, and it refuses easy pieties. You may struggle to make sense of the voices, to fit them into your own overarching narrative, and you will fail because there is no single narrative — these are tales, not a tale, and they force you to ask instead of answering, to continue asking, each tale an answer you’ve probably never heard. When writing can make you do that, at least for a moment, it’s another reason for hope.

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When the introduction has more content and brilliance than most books, you know you are in for a treat in the remaining pages. The founder of Freeman’s and executive editor of Literary Hub wants to break us out of waiting and into the collective action that is our only real hope to slow climate change… This collection may be best savored, contemplated, and reread as a prayer and as a call to action: think about what he’s saying but also enjoy the way he’s saying it. “What if we believed, stupidly or hopefully, that every living life mattered equally?” Freeman writes. Read it. Share it. Let it change the way you relate to our only home.

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Panels on horror fiction and climate writing, memoirs from Peter Frampton and Matthew McConaughey, a celebration of African American poetry, and much more.

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My descriptions come nowhere near doing justice to their stories and the power of their writing. You must read them and encounter their voices yourself—along with those of 34 other contributors, including Edwidge Danticat on Haiti, Mohammed Hanif on Pakistan, Anuradha Roy on India, and Ian Teh on China, to name just a few.

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In this hybrid book of nonfiction, fiction, essays and poems, an all-star lineup of international writers addresses how climate change will exacerbate the gap between rich and poor around the world and put millions of people at greater risk. Margaret Atwood, Anuradha Roy, Lauren Groff and Chinelo Okparanta are among the notable contributors.

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Sep 16, 2020 12:30 PM Pacific Standard Time (US and Canada)

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A church which is shut—a neighborhood [book]shop that has no one on its floors: they don’t bind us in the way they can when full. We need to be together in our aloneness, to see each other being solitary, for being to be bearable. How else to turn the exhaust of simply existing into the hope necessary for living?

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Tales of Two Planets is a mosaic-like compendium of short works compiled and introduced by John Freeman, former editor of Granta. The collection includes Edwidge Danticat writing about Haiti, a poem by Margaret Atwood, and a new Lauren Groff story about a mother immobilized by climate change-related depression, among 30-odd other views on ecological disaster across the world.

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The unequal impact of climate change is chronicled in a collection of essays, poems and stories called “Tales of Two Planets.”

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John Freeman on the origins of Tales of Two Planets

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John Freeman, founding editor of Freeman’s magazine, published in 2017 to great acclaim Tales of Two Americas, an anthology about income inequality. Tales of Two Planets poignantly extends that focus to the rest of the world, revealing how climate change exacerbates inequalities of all kinds in communities impacted hardest. The collection includes essays, fiction, and poems by some of today’s brightest writers. Edwidge Danticat writes about life in Haiti, while Anuradha Roy describes the floods and droughts that have ravaged the Himalayas. Tahmima Anam brings us to a climate-changed Bangladesh, while Lauren Groff illuminates life in Florida, one of America’s most threatened states.

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Maybe it’s not a beach read, unless you want to spend your lounging time contemplating rising seas, superstorms, and the grinding inequalities that will only be further entrenched by the wave of changes beating against the shore of our unstable climate. Editor John Freeman assembled notable writers from around the world (including Margaret Atwood, Edwidge Danticat, Yasmine El Rashidi, and Chinelo Okparanta, among others) and tasked them with commenting on where climate change is and will be most acutely felt, which often is where the writers themselves are from. The result is a collection of poems, short fiction, essays, and reportage that is fascinating in the way staring down a tsunami is fascinating. The book charts twinned humanitarian and ecological crises from Bangladesh to Egypt to Florida to Haiti in tones that range from galvanized and angry to haunted and elegiac. If you’ve only ever read the headlines about climate change wreaking its worst havoc on the world’s most vulnerable, Tales of Two Planets is likely to shock you. For everyone else, it will be a humanization of the broad trends you’ve read about, rendered with poignant specificity by writers who have actually lived them.

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The third in Freeman’s hat trick of anthologies that examines inequalities, Tales of Two Planets, may be the most important, for it addresses a colossal and irreversible threat: climate change. How to tell this story about a landscape so altered by us it’s reciprocating the abuse, where the more vulnerable and poor are more susceptible to environmental injustices?

Freeman asked 36 writers from Iceland to India, who are living within the penumbra of this bifurcated world of disparity and disenfranchisement, to bear witness to climate change beyond mere data. They are the facts on the ground, and their stories about craven US governance, the depletion of species in Burundi, Iceland’s geologic tragedy, the displacement of 20 million people in Pakistan, and resource pilfering and greed in Lebanon trace the inequalities that have also led to environmental imbalances. The purpose of such essays, fictions, reportage, and poems are to remind us—as Lina Mounzer discovers when developers overburden the sewer system in Beirut and it erupts in biblical proportions—we can’t carry on as if things will sort themselves out. We have to live within limits.

It’s a dark path we walk when the majority of the planet belongs to Hobbes’s First Man, condemned to a poor, cruel and short life, while Frances Fukumaya’s Last Man, (privileged, well fed, with access to technology and globalization’s muse) inhabits the rest. The Last Man will survive environmental stress and scarcity. The First Man will not. Freeman’s collection is critical to understanding our planet beyond the scope of our own personal plights.

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Climate change is such an enormous and unwieldy thing that it often feels hard to see, like trying to comprehend the Titanic while standing six inches away from its hull. In Tales of Two Planets, writer and editor John Freeman tries to make the danger clear by offering readers a range of views — fiction, essays, even poetry, spanning locations from Florida to the Himalayas — while zeroing in on the way that global warming intersects with disparities. Writers in the collection, edited by Freeman, include Margaret Atwood and Edwidge Danticat.

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In this eye-opening anthology about climate change, an impressive cast of contributors including Edwidge Danticat, Mohammed Hanif, and Margaret Atwood reflect on how the grim horror of our current ecological reality is being felt around the world.

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Tragically, climate change is one thing that’s not on pause right now, and this impressive collection is a small but engaging way to remind yourself of that. Through poetry, fiction, and reporting, writers from around the world tackle the existential quandaries of living on a dramatically changing planet: Margaret Atwood contributes a poem about rain, Japanese author Sayaka Murata creates an unsettling dystopia in which everyone is rated based on how likely they are to reach age 65, and author and hip-hop artist Gael Faye writes about the disappearance of fireflies from his native Burundi. Every piece is short but impactful.

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To Be or Not to Be, That’s the Goddamn Question

If Freeman’s first two collections left the impression that it was just the world’s Exceptional Democracy™ that was in deep shit and needed to address some serious political and economic issues immediately, well, you were wrong; it turns out we’re all in quick shit, sinking by the moment.

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