A speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe: how we memorialize what has been lost and what soon will be, pushing public imagination into generative realms.

"I am in need of a word," writes Lauren Markham in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She describes her desire to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost-a landscape, a species, birdsong. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of what's to come?

In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative-the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a "ghost forest" of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park-in an attempt to reckon with the grief of climate catastrophe. Can memorials look toward the future as they do to the past? How can we create "a psychic space for feeling" while spurring action and agitating for change?

Immemorial is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

• National print, radio, and online campaign

• Targeted bookseller mailing

• In-person and virtual events

• Advertising in literary outlets

• Promotion on Transit e-newsletter, website, and social media channels

• Promotion on author's social media channels (46K Twitter followers, 17K Instagram followers)

• Giveaways on Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads

• Simultaneous print and ebook release

About the Author
Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and A Map of Future Ruins. Her work has appeared in VQR, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program.

Reviews

Praise for A Map of Future Ruins

"A remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis." -Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Blends memoir, history, and reportage in a wide-ranging and unflinching account. . . . Into this heart-wrenching drama. . . . Markham interweaves ruminations on Greece's twin crises of immigration and emigration. . . . Interspersed throughout are powerful ruminations on ancient Greece as the birthplace of classical Western ideals and the myth-making process inherent to all migration stories. Readers will be thoroughly engrossed." -Publishers Weekly (starred)

"In this brilliant, timely meditation, Markham explores how the stories we tell about borders and who belongs can harden our hearts or help to open them. The threads she follows weave a tapestry as moving as it is illuminating." -Rebecca Solnit, author of HOPE IN THE DARK and A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST

"This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we've been told-and told ourselves-in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we've come to understand as order." -Leslie Jamison, author of THE EMPATHY EXAMS

"A masterpiece of narrative journalism. A Map of Future Ruins is a story of two crises: the current refugee crisis affecting the Greek islands and the long-overlooked identity crisis within White America, whose preoccupation with 'Western culture' as an origin myth she traces both expansively and intimately." -Aminatta Forna, author of HAPPINESS and THE MEMORY OF LOVE

"Luminous and expansive ... Markham shows us what we most urgently need to see."-Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of THE MAN WHO COULD MOVE CLOUDS

Book Information
ISBN 9798893389036
Author Lauren Markham
Format Paperback
Page Count 136
Imprint Transit Books
Publisher Transit Books