Tag Archive for: weather

Weather | Jenny Offill

Lizzie works in a university library. One of her jobs is answering the letters that come in to Hell or High Water, a doom-laden podcast hosted by her former university mentor.

At first, she enjoys the role but soon she finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. Her comfortable lifestyle begins to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows.

‘It’s surprising, given the subject matter, how much fun Weather is, both to read and discuss, and also how darkly funny’ – The Guardian

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2020 and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2021.

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

This is a Picture of Wind | JR Carpenter

This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered south west England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon.

Following the news in the months after these storms, writer and artist J.R. Carpenter was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only perceive indirectly through its affect. The poems that ensued are gathered in this book, accompanied by an introduction by Johanna Drucker, and a poetic afterword by Vahni Capildeo.

Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, ​This is a Picture of Wind attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.