For the better part of a year we’ve been quietly at work on a project that we’re thrilled to announce has come to fruition just in time for this year's season of hurricanes, Nor'easters, and California wildfires—or, as it's sometimes known, the holiday season.
Warmer, our collection of climate fiction (“cli-fi”), has just been published by Amazon Original Stories. Featuring original works by National Book Award Finalists Lauren Groff and Jess Walter, Pulitzer Prize Winner Jane Smiley, New York Times bestselling authors Edan Lepucki and Jesse Kellerman, as well as masters of short fiction Skip Horack and Sonya Larson, the collection is an attempt to examine and reflect on one of our era’s most pressing existential crises.
We conceived and pitched the project to Amazon in hopes of offering fiction writers a voice with which to consider our present planetary moment and imagine its potential futures. The authors, whose work Plympton commissioned and co-founder Yael Goldstein Love edited, were excited by the opportunity to contribute their own interpretations of clarity and caution to the ongoing global warming conversation. The result is a collection of stories that both stand on their own and engage with one another, whose plots are at once startlingly strange and frighteningly conceivable.
Whereas most stories about climate change tend to be speculative in genre, the stories in Warmer shine a light on very real human relationships strained by an increasingly warming planet: boiling heat in winter stokes resentments between a bedridden mother and her son; springtime sleet in Mississippi inspires climate scientists at an open bar to party like there’s no tomorrow; a girl growing up on Cape Cod explores the collectible debris of a world she’s too young to remember. And while most cli-fi is wholly dystopian in outlook, our collection ultimately aims to sow visions of hope—if not optimism—and of trepidation in equal measure.
Warmer is available for purchase as either a Kindle eBook or an Audible audiobook, and free to download for all Amazon Prime members. This is only the first of several Amazon Original Studios collection that Plympton will be commissioning and editing. Collections of Family Secrets, Social Suspense, and Feminist Fiction are all in the works, and will continue to build on our passion for socially relevant fiction.
Enjoy the stories, and keep an eye out for more. We'll be hard at work, right up until the end of the world.