Awards
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2013 Powell's Staff Top 5s
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Staff Pick
Lucy Corin is a writer who will take on anything, and her new collection, comprised of three stories and 100 apocalyptic shorts, hums with an energy truly befitting the end of times. Don't be surprised if you experience conflicting emotions, from hope to dread to bewilderment, all within a single paragraph. Recommended By Renee P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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; 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.
Review
"Lucy Corin has a gift for illuminating the dark and the unsettling through flashes of often absurdist humor, even of beauty." ZYZZYVA
Review
"Corin's elliptical style becomes her greatest asset: Strangeness becomes estranging, unsettling." Kirkus
Review
One Hundred Apocalypses is a delightful, endlessly inventive read." San Francisco Chronicle
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"[M]agical, intellectual, and utterly convincing." Tin House
Review
"[Corin] is at her fearsome best." Los Angeles Review of Books
About the Author
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.