Fiction at the End of the World

As the climate crisis intensifies, none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines, novelists included. Fortunately, two of our most gifted and insightful novelists have turned their considerable talents toward addressing the terrors of a climate-devastated future that’s all too near. In Weather, Jenny Offill employs her signature fractured narrative style to tell the story of a woman juggling her various identities—as a writer, a mother, a former academic, a librarian—and handling the mundane tasks of daily life while becoming increasingly preoccupied with its apocalyptic end. And in A Children’s Bible, which Ron Charles has called “a blistering little classic,” Lydia Millet starkly dramatizes the generational divide around climate change in a novel that finds a group of children and teenagers taking action, Noah’s Ark–style, while their clueless parents descend into torpor and debauchery. Leading their timely and thoughtful conversation is novelist Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne, author of Holding on to Nothing. Sponsored by Lesley University.