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Apocalypse now

Delia Falconer’s new essay collection on climate and culture
by
November 2021, no. 437

Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss by Delia Falconer

Scribner, $32.99 pb, 290 pp

Apocalypse now

Delia Falconer’s new essay collection on climate and culture
by
November 2021, no. 437

Reading Richard Flanagan’s searing allegory The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Delia Falconer’s new non-fiction book, Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss, in rapid succession was a surreal, slightly unmooring experience. Both authors lucidly capture the dreamlike state of disbelief and horrified fury with which we’ve watched the world slide terribly into the 2020s. Both are part of an outpouring of new language, new stories, new ways of expressing our reactions to the barely imaginable scale of realities we can no longer ignore: fire columns that remind NASA of dragons; a pandemic that conjures news scenes we had thought the province of cinema. As our poor human cognition struggles to catch up, scientists become poets, novelists become scientists.

Jonica Newby reviews 'Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss' by Delia Falconer

Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss

by Delia Falconer

Scribner, $32.99 pb, 290 pp

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