Apocalypse

Story Stream

The Big Finish February 06, 2025

“The worst is not. So long as we can say ‘This is the worst,’ ” go the lines from King Lear quoted in Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven. Any stories we tell about the end of the world will have to be fictional, since once the real thi...

Moderation as Pursuit of Justice February 04, 2025

There are perhaps no more cited words of poetry, at least poetry of a genuinely high order, than the opening stanza of W. B. Yeats’s haunting 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” There the Irish poet evokes a true apocalypse where “Things fall apart; the c...

Apocalypse Soon? August 13, 2024

In November 1983, the ABC network premiered The Day After, a film dramatizing World War III from the vantage point of ordinary Americans in and around Lawrence, Kansas. The film provided a plausible flashpoint for conflict: the Warsaw Pact begins a m...

Joy Williams’s Beautiful Apocalypse August 01, 2024

The writer Joy Williams, whose latest book, Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael, was published July 2, has become one of our foremost scribes of environmental destruction and the moral and spiritual questions it raises. Animals and t...