Twenty-Five Favorite Books About the End of the World

(By now, I’ve read well more than a hundred of these. Here are my twenty-five favorites, listed alphabetically by author.)

 

  • Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam (apocalypse by Y2K paranoia)

  • The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard (apocalypse by supersaturation)

  • The Other Side of the Mountain by Michel Bernanos (apocalypse by mineralization)

  • War with the Newts by Karel Čapek (apocalypse by salamander)

  • One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses by Lucy Corin (apocalypse by flash fiction)

  • Recursion by Blake Crouch (apocalypse by time travel)

  • The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria (apocalypse by statuary)

  • The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch (apocalypse by agriculture)

  • The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (apocalypse by immeasurable distance)

  • The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (apocalypse by information vacuum)

  • The Stand by Stephen King (apocalypse by influenza)

  • Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson (apocalypse by isolation)

  • A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller (apocalypse by Catholicism)

  • The Inverted World by Christopher Priest (apocalypse by mathematics)

  • National Anthem: Poems by Kevin Prufer (apocalypse by enjambment)

  • Blindness by José Saramago (apocalypse by white blindness)

  • Golden Days by Carolyn See (apocalypse by Southern California)

  • Meanwhile by Jason Shiga (apocalypse by Killitron 2000)

  • A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims (apocalypse by digression)

  • After World by Debbie Urbanski (apocalypse by A.I.)

  • Borne by Jeff VanderMeer (apocalypse by parenting)

  • Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (apocalypse by human stupidity)

  • The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (apocalypse by thought experiment)

  • Wonderblood by Julia Whicker (apocalypse by cow)

  • The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (apocalypse by botany)

— December 9, 2023


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