One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Lucy Corin's dazzling new collection is powered by one hundred apocalypses: a series of short stories, many only a few lines, that illuminate moments of vexation and crisis, revelations and revolutions. An apocalypse might come in the form of the end of a relationship or the end of the world, but what it exposes is the tricky landscape of our longing for a clean slate.

Three longer stories are equally visionary: in Eyes of Dogs, a soldier returns from war and encounters a witch who may in fact be his mother, Madmen describes an America where children who reach adolescence choose the madman who will accompany them into adulthood and in Godzilla versus the Smog Monster, a teenager is flustered by his older, wilder neighbour while California burns on the other side of the continent.

'...eye popping, enlightening read.' Publishers Weekly

'...deeply rooted in the politics and upheaval of our times"' Lambda Literary

Reviews

There is no writer quite like Lucy Corin. Her control over language--her unique phrasing feels like an incantation--leads the reader willingly toward their own reckoning. What makes Corin such an amazing writer, one of my favorites, is that once she brings you to the end you don't want to leave, because, as she says in one of her apocalypses, 'finally it was all so beautiful.' --Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

Unforgettable voices resist description. Lucy Corin sounds like no one; prickly, shrewd, faintly paranoid or furtive, witty and also savage, she has something of Paley's gift for soliloquy combined with Dickinson's passionate need to hold the world at bay, that sense of a voice emanating from a Skinner box. Her achievement is already dazzling, he promise immense. --Citation of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize

Lucy Corin has a gift for illuminating the dark and the unsettling through flashes of often absurdist humor, even of beauty. --ZYZZYVA

Corin's work engenders creative thought.--San Francisco Magazine

Corin's elliptical style becomes her greatest asset: Strangeness becomes estranging, unsettling. --Kirkus

Corin is one of the few authors who continuously plays with the form of the short story, and the fact that her subject matter is alternate endings to the world (which is the term she uses for these short, morbid vignettes) is amazing.--Memorious Mag

An eye-opening, enlightening read. --Publishers Weekly

[Corin] leaves us thinking deeply about parts of humanity we don't often examine under a magnifying glass. --Bustle.com

"'One Hundred Apocalypses' is a delightful, endlessly inventive read.-- San Francisco Chronicle

Corin's newest collection One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney's) resists categorization. --Lambda Literary

In her newest book, [...] Corin creates a series of dreamscapes in which the apocalypse becomes a set piece for melancholy, humorous, beautiful, and lonely ruminations. --KQED Arts

These mordant, pitch-perfect apopularcalypses mock our manic inflation of the ordinary, how emotional minutiae run rampant in the hyperthyroid imagination of of post-modern, post-religious, post-literate Apocalyptamerica. -The Review of Contemporary Fiction

[U]ndeniably beautiful all the way through--Flavor Wire

Lucy Corin is a genius.--The Revealer

Exhilarating.--The Rumpus

[M]agical, intellectual, and utterly convincing--Tin House

[Corin] is at her fearsome best.--Los Angeles Review of Books

[P]repare for a hackling, for all of your hairs to raise themselves in one grand, creepy salute.--The Diagram

Symphonic, strange, and curiously coherent. --Full Stop

Author Bio

Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collection The Entire Predicament and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. Recent stories appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and Tin House Magazine. She won the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize and usually lives in San Francisco. She teaches at the University of California at Davis.