End Time City

“I had a completely raw, heartfelt, visceral engagement with the city. Almost every night that I spent in Benares I would go to sleep very, very desperate to wake up and have another chance to absorb what was there and connect with it. The city of Benares is an intense combination of fairy tale and nightmare. It is a very holy place to people and every day they come there by the hundreds, or thousands. It’s a never-ending pilgrimage. At the same time, it’s such a dark place where death is ever present. There’s just this poetic chaos to it, a beautiful urgency.”  Michael Ackerman 

While the title End Time City refers to the cremation grounds to which people travel from all over India for their final days, the book conveys the intense life and energy in this place of death. It is a deeply personal and dream-like interpretation of universal themes that are immensely urgent and relevant today.