A revelatory and wide-ranging series of interviews with award-winning writer Arundhati Roy, touching on US empire, Indian nationalism, a writer’s work, and more.

As a novelist, Arundhati Roy is known for her lush language and intricate structure. As a political essayist, her prose is searching and fierce. All of these qualities shine through in the interviews collected here by David Barsamian.

This newly reissued and expanded edition, featuring interviews from 2001 to 2022 and a moving foreword by Naomi Klein, explores Roy’s evolving political thought and commitments across the tumultuous twenty-first entry.
The Architecture of Modern Empire is a searing reckoning with the mechanics of power, in all its forms, and the role of imagination and creative expression in envisioning a radically different world.

Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things.

Arundhati Roy's profile page

David Barsamian's profile page

When we invited journalist and activist Naomi Klein to campus in the fall of 2004, five years after the international success of her bestselling first book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, she was a literary star. She had recently returned from a trip to Iraq for Harper's Magazine, which would form the foundation of her next book, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. We expected she would draw a crowd, so we moved the lecture into the 400-seat St. Thomas University chapel and set up an overflow room downstairs in the cafeteria. When Klein arrived and discovered the overflow room was full, she insisted on stopping there first to address them in person for a few minutes. She said she is always running late; the people in the overflow room were her people. A version of the talk she gave that evening was published in Harper's.

Naomi Klein's profile page

"Again and again, Arundhati has used her gifts as a novelist and trained architect to help us visualize the invisible architecture of modern empire. Crucially, she has helped us to understand how powerful interests that seem to be in conflict—the nation state vs. corporate globalization; religious fundamentalism vs. US capitalism—actually serve to strengthen and protect each other, and join forces to lay waste to democracy.” —Naomi Klein, from the Foreword
"[Arundhati Roy's] fires keep burning all the way through The Architecture of Modern Empire, whether she’s talking in Delhi or Las Vegas, at Berkeley High School or in the back seat of a car driving across Boston. Sometimes she laughs, sometimes she rages, sometimes both."—The Guardian