Capitalism: A Ghost Story - An Evening with Arundhati Roy and Siddhartha Deb
The School of Writing (
http://www.newschool.edu/writing) at
The New School (http://www.newschool.edu) and
Haymarket Books (http://www.haymarketbooks.org) present a reading and conversation with
Siddhartha Deb, and acclaimed novelist and essayist
Arundhati Roy on the occasion of the launch of her new book
Capitalism: A
Ghost Story (Haymarket Books).
From the poisoned rivers, barren wells, and clear-cut forests, to the hundreds of thousands of farmers who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt, to the hundreds of millions of people who live on less than two dollars a day, there are ghosts nearly everywhere you look in
India. India is a nation of
1.2 billion, but the country's
100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India's gross domestic product. Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism has subjugated billions of people to the highest and most intense forms of racism and exploitation.
Arundhati Roy was born in
1959 in
Shillong, India. She studied architecture in
New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy 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 dozens of languages worldwide. She has also written several non-fiction books, including
The Cost of Living,
Power Politics, War
Talk, An
Ordinary Person's
Guide to
Empire, and
Public Power in the
Age of Empire. Roy was featured in the
BBC television documentary Dam/age, which is about the struggle against big dams in India. A collection of interviews with Arundhati Roy by
David Barsamian was published as The Checkbook and the
Cruise Missile. She is a contributor to the Verso anthology
Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Her newest books are
Field Notes on
Democracy:
Listening to Grasshoppers and Capitalism: A Ghost Story, published by Haymarket Books, and
Walking with the
Comrades, published by
Penguin. Roy is the recipient of the
2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural
Freedom Prize.
Siddhartha Deb, who teaches creative writing at The New School, is the author of two novels:
The Point of
Return, which was a
2003 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and An Outline of the
Republic. His reviews and journalism have appeared in
The Boston Globe,
The Guardian,
Harper's Magazine,
The Nation,
New Statesman, n+1, and
The Times Literary Supplement. He is also the author of
The Beautiful and the Damned:
A Portrait of the New India.
John L. Tishman
Auditorium (
U100),
University Center
Wednesday, March 26, 2014 at 7:00 pm