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