With apocalyptic topics ranging from dystopia to nuclear disaster, this reading list compiled by WLT intern Kaitlin Hawkins also conjures ideas of end-days in all forms from poetry to prose.
1. Zombies
Robin Becker, Brains: A Zombie Memoir (HarperCollins, 2010)
www.harpercollins.com
Dead Inside: Do Not Enter (Chronicle Books, 2011)
www.chroniclebooks.com
Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies (Atria Books, 2011)
www.amazon.com
Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Dover, 2010; originally published 1826)
doverpublications.com
Colson Whitehead, Zone One (Knopf Doubleday, 2011)
www.randomhouse.com
2. Natural Disasters/Environmental
Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, 2009)
yearoftheflood.com
J. G. Ballard, The Drought (Norton, 2012; originally published 1964)
books.wwnorton.com
Edward Cohen, Firewater (Akashic Books, 2003)
www.akashicbooks.com
Keizo Hino, Isle of Dreams (Dalkey Archive, 2010)
www.dalkeyarchive.com
James Howard Kunstler, World Made By Hand (Grove Press, 2009)
www.groveatlantic.com
3. Nuclear Disaster
Robert Arellano, Curse the Names (Akashic, 2012)
www.akashicbooks.com
Jacqueline Druga-Marchetti, Dust (Writers Club Press, 2002)
www.amazon.com
Nevil Shute, On the Beach (Bantam, 1972; originally published 1952)
www.randomhouse.com
4. Dystopian
Steven Amsterdam, Things We Didn’t See Coming (Knopf Doubleday, 2010)
www.randomhouse.com
Huang Fan, Zero and Other Fictions (Columbia University Press, 2012)
cup.columbia.edu
Lee Konstantinou, Pop Apocalypse (HarperCollins, 2009)
www.harpercollins.com
Tatyana Tolstaya, The Slynx (New York Review Books, 2007)
www.barnesandnoble.com
5. Story Collections
John Joseph Adams, ed., Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (Night Shade Books, 2008)
nightshadebooks.com
Martin H. Greenberg, The End of the World: Stories of the Apocalypse (Skyhorse, 2010)
www.skyhorsepublishing.com
Hunter Liquore, ed., The Last Man Anthology: Tales of Catastrophe, Disaster, and Woe (Sword and Saga Press, 2010)
www.swordandsagapress.com
Maureen F. McHugh, After the Apocalypse: Stories (Small Beer Press, 2011)
www.amazon.com
6. Poetry
Shane Book, Ceiling of Sticks (University of Nebraska Press, 2010)
www.nebraskapress.unl.edu
Ernesto Cardenal, Apocalypse, and Other Poems (New Directions, 1977)
ndbooks.com
Helene Dorion, No End to the World: Selected Poems (Guernica Editions, 2004)
www.guernicaeditions.com
Jules Supervielle, Homesick for the Earth (Bloodaxe, 2011)
www.bloodaxebooks.com
7. Miscellaneous
