Checkbook and the Cruise Missile

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 studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. A collection of her essays from the past twenty years, My Seditious Heart, was recently published by Haymarket Books.

David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio, and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.