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The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
by Dorian Lynskey
A rich, captivating, and darkly humorous look into the evolution of apocalyptic thought, exploring how film and literature interact with developments in science, politics, and culture, and what factors drive our perennial obsession with the end of the world.
As Dorian Lynskey writes, "People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia." In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularized in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods.
With a discerning eye and acerbic wit, Lynskey examines how various doomsday tropes and predictions in literature, art, music, and film have arisen from contemporary anxieties, whether they be comets, pandemics, world wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Y2K, or the climate emergency. Far from being grim, Lynskey guides readers through a rich array of fascinating stories and surprising facts, allowing us to keep company with celebrated works of art and the people who made them, from H.G. Wells, Jack London, W.B. Yeats and J.G. Ballard to The Twilight Zone, Dr. Strangelove, Mad Max and The Terminator.
Prescient and original, Everything Must Go is a brilliant, sweeping work of history that provides many astute insights for our times and speaks to our urgent concerns for the future.
"This sweeping cultural history from journalist Lynskey chronicles how films, novels, and other media have imagined the apocalypse from ancient times through the present...Lynskey's astute analysis excels at teasing out the existential concerns that have animated artists over the course of millennia. Readers won't want this to end." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Lynskey, a journalist and podcaster, has collected a huge amount of material, ranging from biblical prophecies to sci-fi movies...Exploring a host of apocalypse fantasies with dry wit." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"So enjoyable, that I didn't want it to end—the world, or the book." —Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived
"I was blown away by this book. The staggering range of references, the razor-sharp analysis, the wisdom, left me gasping out loud at times. Lynskey also somehow manages to make a book about the end of the world feel ... hopeful. One of the best non-fiction writers around." —Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireworld
"Impossibly epic, brain-expanding, life-affirming and profound. You'll never see humanity the same way again." —Ian Dunt, author of How Westminster Works
This information about Everything Must Go was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dorian Lynskey is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011) and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 (2019). His writing on music, film, books, and politics has appeared in various publications including The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Spectator, BBC Culture, The Los Angeles Times and Slate.
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