One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses
Stories | McSweeney’s 2016 | ISBN 978-1-94045-002-5
Lucy Corin’s dazzling 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; in “Godzilla versus the Smog Monster,” a teenager is flustered by his older, wilder neighbor while California burns on the other side of the continent.
At once mournful and explosively energetic, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses makes manifest the troubled conscience of an uneasy time.
“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 Dickenson’s passionate need to hold the world at bay, that sense of a voice emanating from a Skinner box. Her achievement is already dazzling, her promise immense.”
Citation of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize
“Prepare for a hackling, for all of your hairs to raise themselves in one grand, creepy salute.”
“Lucy Corin has a gift for illuminating the dark and the unsettling through flashes of often absurdist humor, even of beauty.”
“Magical, intellectual, and utterly convincing”
“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.””
Author of The Family Fang
“Corin creates a series of dreamscapes in which the apocalypse becomes a set piece for melancholy, humorous, beautiful, and lonely ruminations.”
“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.”
“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.”
“[Corin] leaves us thinking deeply about parts of humanity we don’t often examine under a magnifying glass.”
“An eye-opening, enlightening read.”
“One Hundred Apocalypses is a delightful, endlessly inventive read.”