Dealing with reality can be difficult enough, but when the nature of that reality is completely overturned - as it is in a case like the climate crisis - we're left with a feeling of intense unease. What does this mean for us? How can we absorb a revelation that threatens to undermine everything we believe about ourselves and our place in the universe? In this episode, Jacke talks to Allen MacDuffie about his new book Climate of Denial: Darwin, Climate Change, and the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, which examines how writers like George Eliot and H.G. Wells dealt with a post-Darwinian world, and asks whether those examples might help readers cope with today's cataclysmic problems. PLUS novelist Adelle Waldman (Help Wanted) stops by to discuss her choice for the last book she will ever read.

Enjoy this episode? You might enjoy some of these from our archive:

• Upton Sinclair and the Muckraking Novelist (with Adelle Waldman)
• George Eliot
• 330 Middlemarch (with Yang Huang)

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