"It’s legitimate SF, and it’s ‘mainstream,’ and it’s metafiction: I don’t know anyone else doing quite what Lain is doing; fascinating work, moving, strikingly honest, powerful.”—Rich Horton, Locus Magazine Gore Vidal meets Philip K. Dick in this collection of “lit-fabulist” stories. Douglas Lain’s work has been attracting high profile attention throughout the genre, and this collection features some of his finest and most controversial fiction. These stories present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even nuclear Armageddon as comic foils for Lain’s everyman characters. Here is an America where the packets of Sea Monkeys that arrive in the mail contain secret messages and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week’s Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.

Accomplished historical author James Reston, Jr., presents the enthralling saga of how the Christian kingdoms converted, conquered, and slaughtered their way to dominance in Europe as the year 1000 approached. Through Reston's brilliant narrative and engaging portraits of the unforgettable historical characters who embodied the struggle for the soul of Europe, students are introduced to a pivotal period in history during which an old order was crumbling, and terrifying, confusing new ideas were gaining hold in the populace. From the righteous fury of the Viking queen Sigrid the Strong-Minded, who burned unwanted suitors alive; to the brilliant but too-cunning Moor, al-Mansur the Illustrious Victor; to the aptly named English king Ethelred the Unready; to the abiding genius of the age, Pope Sylvester II—warrior kings and concubine empresses, maniacal warriors and religious zealots bring this stirring period to life.

The four kingdoms motif enabled writers of various cultures, times, and places, to periodize history as the staged succession of empires barrelling towards an utopian age. The motif provided order to lived experiences under empire (the present), in view of ancestral traditions and cultural heritage (the past), and inspired outlooks assuring hope, deliverance, and restoration (the future). Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel includes thirteen essays that explore the reach and redeployment of the motif in classical and ancient Near Eastern writings, Jewish and Christian scriptures, texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, depictions in European architecture and cartography, as well as patristic, rabbinic, Islamic, and African writings from antiquity through the Mediaeval eras.

Scott Sigler called Doucette’s cozy apocalypse story, “entertaining as hell.” Come see how the world ends, not with a bang, but a whatever . . . The whateverpocalypse. That’s what Touré, a twenty-something Cambridge coder, calls it after waking up one morning to find himself seemingly the only person left in the city. Once he finds Robbie and Carol, two equally disoriented Harvard freshmen, he realizes he isn’t alone, but the name sticks: Whateverpocalypse. But it doesn’t explain where everyone went. It doesn’t explain how the city became overgrown with vegetation in the space of a night. Or how wild animals with no fear of humans came to roam the streets. Add freakish weather to the mix, swings of temperature that spawn tornadoes one minute and snowstorms the next, and it seems things can’t get much weirder. Yet even as a handful of new survivors appear—Paul, a preacher as quick with a gun as a Bible verse; Win, a young professional with a horse; Bethany, a thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent; and Ananda, an MIT astrophysics adjunct—life in Cambridge, Massachusetts gets stranger and stranger. The self-styled Apocalypse Seven are tired of questions with no answers. Tired of being hunted by things seen and unseen. Now, armed with curiosity, desperation, a shotgun, and a bow, they become the hunters. And that’s when things truly get weird.

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future, by the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine. “Deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects.” —Esquire We’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. What emerges is an absorbing, funny, and deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with what’s ahead.

In this post-apocalyptic rollercoaster ride, philosopher Srećko Horvat invites us to explore the Apocalypse in terms of ‘revelation’ (rather than as the ‘end’ itself). He argues that the only way to prevent the end – i.e., extinction – is to engage in a close reading of various interconnected threats, such as climate crisis, the nuclear age and the ongoing pandemic. Drawing on the work of neglected philosopher Günther Anders, this book outlines a philosophical approach to deal with what Horvat, borrowing a term from climate science and giving it a theological twist, calls ‘eschatological tipping points’. These are no longer just the nuclear age or climate crisis, but their collision, conjoined with various other major threats – not only pandemics, but also the viruses of capitalism and fascism. In his investigation of the future of places such as Chernobyl, the Mediterranean and the Marshall Islands, as well as many others affected by COVID-19, Horvat contends that the ‘revelation’ appears simple and unprecedented: the alternatives are no longer socialism or barbarism – our only alternatives today are a radical reinvention of the world, or mass extinction. After the Apocalypse is an urgent call not only to mourn tomorrow’s dead today but to struggle for our future while we can.

“Combines the spare poetry of The Road with the dizzying pace of 28 Days Later.” —Jennie Melamed, author Gather the Daughters “A riveting novel.” —Eowyn Ivey, bestselling author of The Snow Child Remember your just-in-cases. Beware tall buildings. Always have your knives. Raised in isolation by her mother and Maeve on a small island off the coast of a post-apocalyptic Ireland, Orpen’s life has revolved around training to fight a threat she’s never seen. More and more she feels the call of the mainland, and the prospect of finding other survivors. But that is where danger lies, too, in the form of the flesh-eating menace known as the skrake. Then disaster strikes. Alone, pushing an unconscious Maeve in a wheelbarrow, Orpen decides her last hope is abandoning the safety of the island and journeying across the country to reach the legendary banshees, the rumored all-female fighting force that battles the skrake. But the skrake are not the only threat... Sarah Davis-Goff's Last Ones Left Alive is a brilliantly original imagining of a young woman's journey to discover her true identity.

Who could have known how much influence the writings of a mysterious group of prophets and scribes hundreds of years before Christ would have on our understanding of end times prophecy? As it turns out, much of what we've been taught about Israel in the First Century is incomplete. There were, in fact, Jewish believers who knew exactly what to expect in the coming Messiah: that He would be God in the flesh and would die for our sins. If they accurately predicted the first arrival of Jesus, what did they say about His soon return? In this groundbreaking book, you will learn:?How an ancient Jewish calendar actually predicts the year 2025 AD as prophetically significant?How the enigmatic group, known as the Essenes, formed and what influence they had over the New Testament?Lost prophecies only recently discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls about our time today?What messages the Essenes left behind for believers living in this present age?How the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation fit within the ancient Essene timetable?What hidden feasts and festivals the Essenes observed and what they point to in the future?What were the circumstances of the disappearance of the Essenes and how it connects to every Christian from the past two thousand yearsOnce you learn about the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls they left behind, you will understand the entirety of the Bible in a brand new light. Finally, the prophetic texts of Scripture can be understood as originally intended. Discover what God is revealing in these final years of our current age and what is ahead in the next age, soon to come!

Did Jesus claim to be the "bridegroom"? If so, what did he mean by this claim? When Jesus says that the wedding guests should not fast "while the bridegroom is with them" (Mark 2:19), he is claiming to be a bridegroom by intentionally alluding to a rich tradition from the Hebrew Bible. By eating and drinking with "tax collectors and other sinners," Jesus was inviting people to join him in celebrating the eschatological banquet. While there is no single text in the Hebrew Bible or the literature of the Second Temple Period which states the "messiah is like a bridegroom," the elements for such a claim are present in several texts in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea. By claiming that his ministry was an ongoing wedding celebration he signaled the end of the Exile and the restoration of Israel to her position as the Lord's beloved wife. This book argues that Jesus combined the tradition of an eschatological banquet with a marriage metaphor in order to describe the end of the Exile as a wedding banquet.

A bold and urgent perspective on how American foreign policy must change in response to the shifting world order of the twenty-first century, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Limits of Power and The Age of Illusions. The purpose of U.S. foreign policy has, at least theoretically, been to keep Americans safe. Yet as we confront a radically changed world, it has become indisputably clear that the terms of that policy have failed. Washington’s insistence that a market economy is compatible with the common good, its faith in the idea of the “West” and its “special relationships,” its conviction that global military primacy is the key to a stable and sustainable world order—these have brought endless wars and a succession of moral and material disasters. In a bold reconception of America’s place in the world, informed by thinking from across the political spectrum, Andrew J. Bacevich—founder and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a bipartisan Washington think tank dedicated to foreign policy—lays down a new approach—one that is based on moral pragmatism, mutual coexistence, and war as a last resort. Confronting the threats of the future—accelerating climate change, a shift in the international balance of power, and the ascendance of information technology over brute weapons of war—his vision calls for nothing less than a profound overhaul of our understanding of national security. Crucial and provocative, After the Apocalypse sets out new principles to guide the once-but-no-longer sole superpower as it navigates a transformed world.