Immemorial

Immemorial

$17.95

Lauren Markham

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.

SHIPS JANUARY 15, 2025

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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