The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
John Green, author of the bestsellers Turtles All the Way Down and The Fault in Our Stars, announced that in May 2021 he will publish an essay collection adapted from his popular podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed.
Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, will publish the collection from Green, whose works have been translated into 55 languages with more than 50 million copies in print worldwide. Scheduled for publication next May 18, The Anthropocene Reviewed is adapted and expanded from the groundbreaking podcast Green writes and hosts in partnership with WNYC Studios, and will include new pieces exclusive to the book. It is Green’s first work of nonfiction.
The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale — from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu.
Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene’s reviews have been praised as “observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy.” John Green’s gift for storytelling shines throughout this collection, which will include both beloved selections and all-new essays.
“Before I was a novelist, before I was a YouTuber, I was a book reviewer. The format still fascinates me,” says Green. “As I’ve been revising and expanding the essays for The Anthropocene Reviewed, I’ve begun to understand these reviews as an attempt to chart the contradictions of human life as I experience it — how we can be so compassionate and so cruel, so persistent and so quick to despair, and how consciousness is at once depraved in its meaninglessness and profoundly sacred in its meaning.”
Julie Strauss-Gabel, President and Publisher of Dutton Books for Young Readers, and Green’s longtime editor, will partner with Dutton on the publication. She said, “It is a gift to bring these remarkable essays to the page. I hear John in every word. Inexhaustible curiosity and a profound sense of empathy have always informed and enriched his novels because they are so true to John as a person.”
