The New Earth Reader

by David Rothenberg

Published 4 January 2000
This is a collection of the best essays, stories, and interviews from "Terra Nova," the cutting-edge literary journal. It explores the complex and multifarious ways humanity is loose in the natural world. Find out who really wrote the famous Chief Seattle speech. Read why Jaron Lanier wants to turn us all into giant squid so we can talk to one another without language. Rick Bass travels to the country with the most grizzly bears per square mile: Romania. Gary Nabhan dreams of raven stew. Val Plumwood is half-swallowed by a crocodile and lives to tell the tale and affirm her vegetarianism. Charles Bowden enters Tuna Country in Mexico and struggles to find his way back across the border. Ray Isle fights with a wild turkey; see who wins. And find out why filmmaker Errol Morris thinks that human dreamers are the most endangered species around.

Writing the World

by David Rothenberg and Wandee J. Pryor

Published 1 January 2005

This collection of essays, memoirs, poems, stories, and artwork looks at globalization as a worldwide exchange of art and ideas. Writing the World focuses on the cultural realities of globalism -- the opportunities it provides to learn from other cultures. This knowledge, argue David Rothenberg and Wandee Pryor in their introduction, can be power: "When all of us learn enough about our differences to respect the diversity that exists, we will be unable to pretend we are the same. We will never accept the old innocence and ignorance bred by oppression and exploitation." For the contributors to Writing the World, to dream of the global village is to see the world not as a vast market but as a place of shared values and linked wonder."It is time to listen to the many literate voices the world speaks," say Rothenberg and Pryor. The voices of Writing the World range from Arundhati Roy on the "colonization of knowledge" in her essay "The Ladies Have Feelings, So... Shall We Leave It to the Experts?" to Naomi Klein's meditation on fences, ownership, and property. They include Bill McKibben on women farmers in Bangladesh, Hannes Westberg's account of being shot by Swedish police at a demonstration, James Barilla on invading and indigenous plant species in "The Aliens in the Garden," and many other vivid, compelling, and provocative writings that celebrate -- and illustrate -- "the poetry of cultural contact." Artists and photographers whose work appears in the book include Adam Clayman, Jenny Matthews, Richard Robinson, and Arpita Singh.