Age of Anger

BOOK
NON-FICTION
US & Canada Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc (Ed. Eric Chinksi)
UK & Comm Allen Lane (Ed. Simon Winder)
Feb 2017

By Pankaj Mishra Translation Rights Sold

Dutch Uitgeverij Atlas
BOOKS Amanda Urban, +1 212 556 5600, kgreenstreet@icmpartners.com
TRANSLATION RIGHTS Sophie Baker, +44 (0)20 7393 4425, sophie@curtisbrown.co.uk German S Fischer Verlag
Italian Arnoldo Mondadori
Editore
A History of the Present
Japanese Soshisha
Korean Open Books Co.
One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of
Portuguese (PT) Circulo De Leitores
our current global crisis
Spanish Galaxia Gutenberg

The attempt to Westernize, modernize, or secularize the non-West was long

viewed benignly as a process of development and progress. Today, Audio Rights
however, botched experiments in Western-style politics, military m Unavailable
intervention, and economic engineering visibly scar much of the non-
Western world. The wider embrace of Western innovationsrevolutionary
politics, mass movements, technology, the pursuit of wealth and
individualismhas caused an extensive destruction of old social and moral
bonds. The radical disruption, which includes the remaking of lifes meaning
and goals, has cast billions adrift in a literally demoralized world, uprooted
from tradition but still far from modernity.

Unable to fulfill the promisesstability and prosperityof the global

capitalist economy, and culturally and spiritually disoriented, many men and
women are increasingly susceptible to demagogues and other dangerous
simplifiers. A common reaction among them is intense hatred of supposed
villains, the invention of enemies, attempts to recapture a lost golden age,
unfocused fury, and self-empowerment through nihilistic violence. These
are all phenomena familiar in Europe and the United States, though
obscured for a while by their general post-1945 experience of relative
affluence and peace. They have now become inescapable in our
interconnected and profoundly unequal world.

Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishras remarkable new book, allows us at last to

come to grips with how we can understand societies that are violently adrift.