A woman is incarcerated indefinitely because an algorithm predicts she might be a threat. A woman is fleeing climate disaster only to have her passport stolen by a desperate thief trying to feed his family.
In Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel and Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief, the line between dystopian fiction and reflections of our current reality is blurred. Tackling surveillance culture, the algorithms absorbing our data, climate catastrophe, and global inequality, these novels remind us that political and societal forces intimately shape our daily lives.
Moderated by PEN America Co-CEO Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, this discussion will look at the collision between the future and the present, and between the personal and the political.
