On Topic: George Packer’s “The Emergency” (Imperial Collapse & Humanity)

City of Asylum’s On Topic series returns for the fall season with The Atlantic staff writer George Packer. In this reading and discussion, George shares his new work—a foray into the realm of fiction titled The Emergency—and brings us a visionary novel that goes to the nerve center of what it means to live in a time of fracture and upheaval.

Praised by Ayad Akhtar (Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Homeland Elegies) as a “robustly imagined political parable…at once a gripping adventure and a vivid portrait of a family riven by a changing world,” The Emergency depicts an empire that has collapsed from boredom and loss of faith in itself. 

In it, Doctor Hugo Rustin, chief surgeon at the Imperial College Hospital, is increasingly estranged from his city and his family—from his wife, Annabelle, who finds fulfillment in their changed community, and especially from his teenage daughter, Selva, who has turned against her father’s values. When an incident at the hospital leads to Rustin’s disgrace, he seeks redemption in a quixotic and dangerous journey into the countryside, with Selva as his companion, just as the conflict between Burghers and Yeomen is reaching a crisis.

In the end, The Emergency asks what we owe each other across divided generations and classes—what common human bonds remain when a society falls apart?

You can purchase a copy of George’s book, The Emergency, at City of Asylum Bookstore.

About the Author:

George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His novel, The Emergency, has just been published by Farrar Straus Giroux. His books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and he is the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.

About the Moderator:

Adriana E. Ramírez is a writer, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction,  Dead Boys (Little A, 2016). Her reviews, essays, and poems have also appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, and Literary Hub, among others.  She occasionally reviews books for People Magazine. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she founded the infamous Nasty Slam in Pittsburgh and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is closed on Mondays, but a cash wine bar will be available.