Atish Rex Ghosh, who works at the IMF, also writes novels. In the calm mid 00’s, after finishing a manuscript about an international financial crisis, he had trouble finding a publisher because the central idea seemed implausible. He wound up publishing it initially in Britain under the pen name Brett Wood, a play on “Bretton Woods,” of course. After the financial crisis of 2008-09, fact no longer seemed stranger than fiction, and an American publisher issued an edition by Rex Ghosh. The book is called Nineteenth Street NW, after the street that runs past the IMF and World Bank headquarters buildings, and it was the subject of an article in the New York Times.
