One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses

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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

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

"A sharp-tongued, hallucinatory writer, Corin will prepare you for whatever it is that's coming or at least distract you from it." New York Magazine, The Cut Book Club

"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

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

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

"Lucy Corin is a genius." The Revealer

"Exhilarating." The Rumous

"[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

Set in the past, present and an undefinable future, Corin's (Everyday Psycho-killers) collection of stories, fables, anecdotes, prose poems and situational musings center not just on the end of the world, but the rapture of existence. A greedy soldier meets a witch who could be his mother on the road home from war and uncovers jewels in deep holes guarded by giant dogs, high school kids take refuge in a snowy cave while California burns and parents, glued to TV's, sit in bed with trays of cheese sandwiches . Couples, families, brothers, lovers, meth addicts, and drunken zombies cope with what is left after loss. In the short piece "Questions in Significantly Smaller Font" (the title is quite literal, you may need a magnifying glass) Corbin asks: "What will the apocalypse mean for narrative" The answer may not come so easily, but the craft and language makes the journey quite satisfying. With stories within stories and tiny typeface preceded by two sentence tales, this fulfilling maze, guided by a constant theme, is an eye-opening, enlightening read." Publishers Weekly

"There is no writer quite like Lucy Corin. Her control over languageher unique phrasing feels like an incantationleads 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

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

"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

"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

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

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

Praise for Lucy Corin:

Pure sleight of hand. How is it done Come closer, I'll tell you. She closes her eyes and watches the movies playing 24-7 inside the lids." Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

Fiercely strange and written with keen control. You don't read these stories: you undergo them. They are an event that is lived, not an object that is scanned. Language here is a tangible sensation; Corin's words have weight, temperature, odor, texture, bite. Vision and noise invade you. You become anxious. Then you may find yourself pinching your nose, squeezing your eyes, so as not to let this world escape your body." Micaela Morrissette, Rain Taxi

If prudence allowed, I would populate this review with nothing but passages from Lucy Corin's mesmerizing collection of stories, The Entire Predicament. My notes are filled with sentences and paragraphs that beg to be shared." Chas Bowie, The Portland Mercury

These stories take about ten seconds each to get their hooks in you for life. Do those hooks hurt Of course they do, in all the funnest ways." Roy Kesey, E! Online Books You Must Read

These short stories are as smart as pinpricks, magic tricks. They go off like a string of firecrackers." Kelly Link

Lucy Corin is a fearless writer." Pam Houston

Lucy Corin's Swiftian satires are brilliant-stunningly so-and entirely original." Rikki Ducornet

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

Lucy Corin's The Entire Predicament is a book of eyes and I's. Behold, wherever Corin's eye falls on this occluded world of ours, it is transformed in a twinkling-the scales come unhinged and we can't fail to see to see." Michael Martone

Sometimes quirkily funny, sometimes shading into menace or serious derangement, The Entire Predicament zigzags its way over the walls we tend to build between the serious, the absurd, the humorous, the off-kilter, and the mad. This is an uncanny book." Brian Evenson

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.