Plankton Dreams: What I Learned in Special-Ed

In Plankton Dreams,Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay crafts a proud, satiric style: the special ed student as literary troublemaker. ‘Mother had always taught me to learn from circumstance,’ he writes. ‘Here, the circumstance was humiliation, a particularly instructive teacher.’ ‘But I’m not complaining,’ he continues. ‘Humiliation, after all, made me a philosopher.’For all of its comic effects, the book alerts readers to an alternative understanding of autism, an understanding that autistics themselves have been promoting for years.