What happens when the future stops feeling distant and starts reading like a dispatch from right now? In very different ways, George Packer, Ben Fountain, and Amal El-Mohtar write out of that sense of slippage. Packer’s The Emergency follows a surgeon through the collapse of an empire, but its class divisions, political extremity, and civic breakdown feel unnervingly familiar. Fountain, in Beautiful Country Burn Again and Rasputin Swims the Potomac, brings a satirist’s eye to American democracy in its most feverish and degraded forms. And El-Mohtar, in This Is How You Lose the Time War and Seasons of Glass and Iron, bends speculative fiction toward longing, myth, and alternate possibility. A conversation about allegory, dystopia, and the futures already taking shape inside the present.
Date
Jun 20, 1:30pm to 2:30pm
Featuring
George Packer
George Packer is an award-winning journalist, novelist, playwright, and staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, which won the National Book Award, as well as The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and The End of the American Century, winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles TimesBook Prize for Biography, and most recently the novel The Emergency. He is also the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.
Ben Fountain
Ben Fountain’s most recent book is the novel Rasputin Swims the Potomac. His work has received the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, among other honors, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. A former practicing attorney in Texas, he now lives in eastern North Carolina.
Amal El-Mohtar
Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Fireside Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium; anthologies including The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories (2017), and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016); and in her own collections, The Honey Month (2010). and Stories of Glass and Iron (2026). She is co-author, with Max Gladstone, of the multiple award-winning This is How You Lose the Time War.
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