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Oil Fictions, an essay collection edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi, offers critical literary analysis of a play and a selection of novels and short stories which interrogate how oil and historical economic structures impact society. Chapter authors, which include Amitav Ghosh and Imre Szeman, bring these stories into conversation with one another and with a range of social and literary theorists. Many of the essays concern the marginalization of people living near extraction sites in the Global South and suggest a number of creative strategies to tell the story of oil. Authors react to Amitav Ghosh’s observation that oil-storytelling has been overly focused on the Global North, and to his claim that an effective storytelling form for communicating the social, economic, and political consequences of the “Oil Encounter” has yet to be created. The 2021 collection’s examination of at least fifteen fictional texts offers insight into the petrocultural consequences in the Global South, both by explicating existing literature as well as advocating for additional texts to join the category and the conversation. In addition, these writers offer ideas on how the category of petrofiction should be expanded to include narratives about economic structures that anticipated the oil-regime, novels which embrace speculative writing approaches, and quotidian stories set near extraction sites despite the absence of overt oil production detail.

Oil Fictions, an essay collection edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi, offers critical literary analysis of a play and a selection of novels and short stories which interrogate how oil and historical economic structures impact society. Chapter authors, which include Amitav Ghosh and Imre Szeman, bring these stories into conversation with one another and with a range of social and literary theorists. Many of the essays concern the marginalization of people living near extraction sites in the Global South and suggest a number of creative strategies to tell the story of oil. Authors react to Amitav Ghosh’s observation that oil-storytelling has been overly focused on the Global North, and to his claim that an effective storytelling form for communicating the social, economic, and political consequences of the “Oil Encounter” has yet to be created. The 2021 collection’s examination of at least fifteen fictional texts offers insight into the petrocultural consequences in the Global South, both by explicating existing literature as well as advocating for additional texts to join the category and the conversation. In addition, these writers offer ideas on how the category of petrofiction should be expanded to include narratives about economic structures that anticipated the oil-regime, novels which embrace speculative writing approaches, and quotidian stories set near extraction sites despite the absence of overt oil production detail.