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One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses

Lucy Corin

9781944211103
192 pages
Mcsweeney's Literary Arts Fund
Overview

Lucy Corin's "eye popping, enlightening read" (Publishers Weekly), now in paperback.

At the heart of Lucy Corin's dazzling collection are one hundred apocalypses: visions of loss and destruction, vexation and crisis, revelation and revolution, sometimes only a few lines long. In these haunting and wickedly funny stories, an apocalypse might come in the form of the end of a relationship or the end of the world, but they all expose the tricky landscape of our longing for a clean slate. In three longer stories, contemporary American life is playfully, if disturbingly, distorted: the rite of passage for adolescent girls involves choosing the madman who will accompany them into adulthood; California burns to the ground while, on the east coast, life carries on; and a soldier returns home broke from war to encounter a witch who extends a dangerous offer.

At once mournful and explosively energetic, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses is "deeply rooted in the politics and upheaval of our times" (Lambda Literary).