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Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling
All of American literature is a tragedy. What we're living through now isn't a tragedy, however – it's a horror novel. Why bother writing when the world's on fire?
Rising authoritarianism. Covid. Inflation. Wealth disparity. War. Climate change. While every time period is marked by apocalyptic fears, it certainly seems like our current anxieties aren't ill placed. And yet, art and literature persist.
In captivating and culturally savvy prose, Ed Simon grapples with the notion that writers and their work ought to distract readers from the dire situation we face in these fetid days of the Anthropocene. He also addresses the wider question of what it's like to write during what could be the last decades of human civilization, arguing that to craft imaginative spaces through the magic of words isn't superfluous. Instead it exists at the core of human experience – as it always has and always will.
Examining creativity as it has manifested in similarly dire circumstances in human history – in a broad range of authors and texts, such as the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Voltaire, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and Stephen King's The Stand – Writing During the Apocalypse eschews the easy defeatism of nihilism. Instead, it offers a hopeful perspective on the various ways that literary expression can endow a meaningless world with meaning and generate a spark in the darkness.
With the infamous four horsemen as its guide, Writing During the Apocalypse honors the literary life even during the end of the world.
Rising authoritarianism. Covid. Inflation. Wealth disparity. War. Climate change. While every time period is marked by apocalyptic fears, it certainly seems like our current anxieties aren't ill placed. And yet, art and literature persist.
In captivating and culturally savvy prose, Ed Simon grapples with the notion that writers and their work ought to distract readers from the dire situation we face in these fetid days of the Anthropocene. He also addresses the wider question of what it's like to write during what could be the last decades of human civilization, arguing that to craft imaginative spaces through the magic of words isn't superfluous. Instead it exists at the core of human experience – as it always has and always will.
Examining creativity as it has manifested in similarly dire circumstances in human history – in a broad range of authors and texts, such as the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Voltaire, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and Stephen King's The Stand – Writing During the Apocalypse eschews the easy defeatism of nihilism. Instead, it offers a hopeful perspective on the various ways that literary expression can endow a meaningless world with meaning and generate a spark in the darkness.
With the infamous four horsemen as its guide, Writing During the Apocalypse honors the literary life even during the end of the world.
218 pages, Hardcover
First published January 8, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 16, 2026
Very dramatic and, to me, incredibly overwritten (I'm all for purple prose but if I feel like I need to crack open a thesaurus or check if the book was published a century ago you might be doing too much).
What I mean by dramatic is that Simon repeats over and over that we might be the last or one of the last two generations (which one, I ask, since there are like five or six alive right now), and I just don't get the time scope of this. But he really is obsessed with this, stating that there basically is no reason for any one person to still fight the climate catastrophe, unless it's simply to make us feel better, because it is entirely pointless and won't change anything. What kind of fucking opinion is this? Simon can't be all holier than though and pretend that poets are gods and oh so important and will save the world because literature is so important while also at the same time pretending that actual, physical acts to keep one more species from dying out or working towards a better future, even if we all die anyway (because we all will, he agrees with me here while he drones on about billionaires being scared of death as if billionaires aren't scared of everything), is pointless. Especially if we're going to die within the next fifty years as he seems to assume, maybe we can save a bit more of the world then, no?
But despite him also saying stuff like "the planet has existed before us and will exist after us", he seems to not really differentiate between the end of humanity and the actual end of the world, conflating our end with the end of the planet, which is a huge pet peeve of mine. Let this beautiful planet survive us.
To the international reader, this book is very US-centric. I would probably have to reread it to grasp everything the author was trying to say, but I don't think I care enough to do so. He talks a lot about the (end of the) Roman Empire, possibly only to draw parallels to the modern day USA, but I find it incredibly ingenious as a US-focused book and therefore author to ignore the literal apocalypse Native Americans went through.
A few parts of this book are about the Covid pandemic, which I always hugely struggle with, especially when it's compared to pandemics like the Black Death or others where 70-90% of the population died. Usually I find it interesting how the Covid pandemic affected the author or the character they're talking about, but once again it's all just very dramatic. I'm aware that being an essential worker in rural Germany at the time isn't comparable to lockdown in a big city in the US with no healthcare and I truly think that it was a scary time, but it wasn't apocalyptic. The world very obviously, especially visible through social media, kept on turning. People knew what was happening from basically the get go. And I struggled with Simon's obvious empathy and suffering for all the people who died, when in the parts about war he's much more clinical, even quoting that one saying about deaths in such multitude becoming a statistic. I just don't understand how people dying in a pandemic is a tragedy when people dying in a war isn't.
To finally end this, I'm not sure if I missed most of the parts where Simon "offers a hopeful perspective on the various ways that literary expression can endow a meaningless world with meaning", which is what I was mostly interested in when picking this book up. There are instances, like when he talks about Station Eleven or AI, but I wanted more. More hopefulness overall, but also more focus on how we are social, creative creatures. How maybe it's an apocalypse unto itself that we're forced and manipulated into giving that up, that a lot of the depression and feeling of meaninglessness in our lives comes from the fact that we don't create because TikTok's dopamine rush is easier, because books like this tell us there is no reason to try anyway because we're already doomed. We are. Doesn't mean there is no meaning in being creative and trying to save the world even if we can't save ourselves. (There, no need to read the book now ;) )
What I mean by dramatic is that Simon repeats over and over that we might be the last or one of the last two generations (which one, I ask, since there are like five or six alive right now), and I just don't get the time scope of this. But he really is obsessed with this, stating that there basically is no reason for any one person to still fight the climate catastrophe, unless it's simply to make us feel better, because it is entirely pointless and won't change anything. What kind of fucking opinion is this? Simon can't be all holier than though and pretend that poets are gods and oh so important and will save the world because literature is so important while also at the same time pretending that actual, physical acts to keep one more species from dying out or working towards a better future, even if we all die anyway (because we all will, he agrees with me here while he drones on about billionaires being scared of death as if billionaires aren't scared of everything), is pointless. Especially if we're going to die within the next fifty years as he seems to assume, maybe we can save a bit more of the world then, no?
But despite him also saying stuff like "the planet has existed before us and will exist after us", he seems to not really differentiate between the end of humanity and the actual end of the world, conflating our end with the end of the planet, which is a huge pet peeve of mine. Let this beautiful planet survive us.
To the international reader, this book is very US-centric. I would probably have to reread it to grasp everything the author was trying to say, but I don't think I care enough to do so. He talks a lot about the (end of the) Roman Empire, possibly only to draw parallels to the modern day USA, but I find it incredibly ingenious as a US-focused book and therefore author to ignore the literal apocalypse Native Americans went through.
A few parts of this book are about the Covid pandemic, which I always hugely struggle with, especially when it's compared to pandemics like the Black Death or others where 70-90% of the population died. Usually I find it interesting how the Covid pandemic affected the author or the character they're talking about, but once again it's all just very dramatic. I'm aware that being an essential worker in rural Germany at the time isn't comparable to lockdown in a big city in the US with no healthcare and I truly think that it was a scary time, but it wasn't apocalyptic. The world very obviously, especially visible through social media, kept on turning. People knew what was happening from basically the get go. And I struggled with Simon's obvious empathy and suffering for all the people who died, when in the parts about war he's much more clinical, even quoting that one saying about deaths in such multitude becoming a statistic. I just don't understand how people dying in a pandemic is a tragedy when people dying in a war isn't.
To finally end this, I'm not sure if I missed most of the parts where Simon "offers a hopeful perspective on the various ways that literary expression can endow a meaningless world with meaning", which is what I was mostly interested in when picking this book up. There are instances, like when he talks about Station Eleven or AI, but I wanted more. More hopefulness overall, but also more focus on how we are social, creative creatures. How maybe it's an apocalypse unto itself that we're forced and manipulated into giving that up, that a lot of the depression and feeling of meaninglessness in our lives comes from the fact that we don't create because TikTok's dopamine rush is easier, because books like this tell us there is no reason to try anyway because we're already doomed. We are. Doesn't mean there is no meaning in being creative and trying to save the world even if we can't save ourselves. (There, no need to read the book now ;) )
March 30, 2026
“Every human is a universe; each individual in victory and defeat, love and hatred, desire and revulsion, is more complicated than all great literature, more beautiful than every painting, truer than all of the axioms of philosophy”
i like it a lot
i like it a lot
April 24, 2026
The way the book is set up intrigued me. Simons’ whole premise is that our society is on the verge of apocalyptic ruin, and that we are starting to hear the hoof beats of the four horsemen. The horsemen are given titles that relate eerily to modern times. The white horse is pandemic, the red horse is authoritarianism, the black horse is technological advancement (ai), and the pale horse is climate change. I enjoyed this modern rendition, but not the “it’s too late to reverse our doom and everyone who is reading this will likely face an awful death rather than the hospital bed surrounded by friends and family that has become normalized” approach. I don’t endorse sugar coating, and I believe the truth should be accurately conveyed (no matter how dull), but the overall message being “keep writing even when everything sucks!” felt less impactful when the majority of the book was nihilistic remarks. My biggest gripe with this book is the number of literary references the author makes to articulate his points, but without going into detail about the reference. Some of them are quite niche, so subtext would have been helpful. It comes across as trying to sound as intellectual as possible when the general idea could be articulated in fewer words. It often feels like you have to have read a hundred other poems and books to understand what he’s saying, which isn’t realistic unless literature is your profession and world.
That’s not to say there weren’t stand out moments I enjoyed!
A few quotes I liked:
“The task of war literature is to transform shadows into pictures, to put flesh upon the bones of mere statistics.”
“We feared robots before we even built them, and yet, we built them anyway.”
There was another quote I’m having trouble finding again, though I wrote the latter half down. It commented on life’s unpredictability, saying that being victorious in the moment doesn’t negate that “…we still might die of a heart attack on the track.”
That’s not to say there weren’t stand out moments I enjoyed!
A few quotes I liked:
“The task of war literature is to transform shadows into pictures, to put flesh upon the bones of mere statistics.”
“We feared robots before we even built them, and yet, we built them anyway.”
There was another quote I’m having trouble finding again, though I wrote the latter half down. It commented on life’s unpredictability, saying that being victorious in the moment doesn’t negate that “…we still might die of a heart attack on the track.”
Read
May 6, 2026I had a really hard time getting into this book and that's fine. It was way more America-centric than I expected so a whole lot of things went way over my head (because they lacked explanation) and I didn't find the scope to be what I wanted it to be. But that's more of a me problem than anything else. And this is no insult to Simon but I listened to the audiobook and the orator's voice had me rolling my eyes a lot. Although to be fair some of the sentences really annoyed me in their exaggeration or sanctimonious nature as well--ala the whole, wishing to be in Europe felt simultaneously insulting to both the colonial history of America (even though he mentions this briefly) and the assumption of Europe as some form of tablua rasa (as if the whole of Europe wasn't affected by its own feudalism and serfdom). Not to mention, I have a hard time trusting any man who can't pronounce Iraq and Iran the way they can pronounce Italy or Ibiza.
I think the demographic for this book is good for middle to upperclass American white folks and that's okay. If you're looking for someone who can discuss various historical events and literary pieces from all over the world, and the reader still getting it, I highly recommend anything by Amitav Ghosh. He does a great job discussing historical and political events from around the world (with the lens of the Anthropocene in mind) and readers still getting it--regardless of where you're from.
I think the demographic for this book is good for middle to upperclass American white folks and that's okay. If you're looking for someone who can discuss various historical events and literary pieces from all over the world, and the reader still getting it, I highly recommend anything by Amitav Ghosh. He does a great job discussing historical and political events from around the world (with the lens of the Anthropocene in mind) and readers still getting it--regardless of where you're from.
April 17, 2026
I may be a bit biased, as this book is pretty navel gazing for someone of my politics, but I enjoyed it.
It’s easy to feel hopeless in what feels like, and probably is, the end of the world. And while this book rambles on, and comes to no real conclusions other than, we must keep on because we have no choice, but you’re not crazy for feeling hopeless, camaraderie at the end of the world is nice.
It’s a bummer, but an interesting bummer.
—-
Nonsense
This book contains at least four instances of the word Potomac. I know at least four because I might have missed a first one because the narrator whiffs it so hard on the pronunciation that I almost didn’t understand what he was going for. But then clocked it every other time because he whiffs it again, nails it, and then somehow whiffs it again at the end.
There is some other questionable pronunciation throughout the book, but this is a pretty famous river. How did no one clock it?
It’s easy to feel hopeless in what feels like, and probably is, the end of the world. And while this book rambles on, and comes to no real conclusions other than, we must keep on because we have no choice, but you’re not crazy for feeling hopeless, camaraderie at the end of the world is nice.
It’s a bummer, but an interesting bummer.
—-
Nonsense
This book contains at least four instances of the word Potomac. I know at least four because I might have missed a first one because the narrator whiffs it so hard on the pronunciation that I almost didn’t understand what he was going for. But then clocked it every other time because he whiffs it again, nails it, and then somehow whiffs it again at the end.
There is some other questionable pronunciation throughout the book, but this is a pretty famous river. How did no one clock it?
May 1, 2026
A well-crafted and engaging experience that exceeded my expectations. It delivered exactly what it promised.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews