UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Emerging Worlds and the Center for Cultural Studies present the new series, “Book Talks,” which invites authors to read from their books and engage in discussion. Next week we present Anna Tsing reading from “The Mushroom at the End of the World.”

A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, “The Mushroom at the End of the World” follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. In all its contradictions, the matsutake mushroom offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made? By investigating one of the world’s most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination in to the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.

Anna Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at UCSC and a Neils Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she codirects Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA). She is author of “Friction” and “In the Realm of the Diamond Queen.”