This book was a huge disappointment. It contains 34 short stories supposedly on the theme of the end of the world. I have read a few collections like this and knew that it's unreasonable to expect to like every story, but I can honestly say that I found at least 30 of them confusing and/or a chore to finish. Almost none of them have any understandable link to an apocalypse of any sort, and some of them made no sense at all to me. I literally couldn't understand what the story was about. I kept t...

Loved the Poe story the most.

A bunch of great short stories. Authors I’d like to read more from: Stacey Levine, Jared Hohl, Lucy Corin, Allison Whittenberg, Kelly Link, Steve Aylett, Colette Phair, Terese Svoboda, Theodora Goss, and Joyce Carol Oates.My favorite was the hilarious “These zombies are not a metaphor” by Jeff Goldberg, where a man tries in vain to convince his imbecilic roommates that the zombies outside their door are NOT a metaphor, but are in fact literally zombies.

If T.S Eliot read 'The Apocalypse Reader' he would have said: This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a YAWN.This book was one of the most boring collection of short stories I have ever read. The stores full of heavy handed symbolism and "experimental" writing reminded me of Freshman Creative Writing Class. And the sad thing is that I feel like I am insulting Freshman writers everywhere because at least they have the humili...

A month or so ago Cari and I went to see local Author Jemiah Jefferson read from her new Cyberpunk web novel First world. She did an excellent reading, from talking to Jemiah at events around town I was already sold on the project but her reading was quite good. You can read the novel for free online, and vote on the direction of the remaining chapters.There was another author reading that night who has a book out with the same publisher. Brian Evenson, who I had not heard and now I feel bad for...

"THESE ARE THE WAYS THE WORLD ENDS—THIRTY-FOUR NEW AND SELECTED DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS"This is a gorgeous book, from presentation to content. The selections are humorous, serious, simple, complex, and much more—thirty-four stories, some short, some long, make for a wide spectrum of apocalypses. Taylor, in the foreword, expounds on his conception of an apocalypse:"It's worth pointing out that the word Apocalypse comes from the Greek, and literally means "a revelation" or "an unveiling." It can be use...

I am sadly disappointed by this collection of work. I was (mistakenly) expecting science fiction, which this book is NOT. It's more literary reading, something I do not enjoy. This is my own fault perhaps as I believe now that misunderstood the title. That however is not the extent of my disappointment with the book. While it did have a couple of excellent stories (perhaps 5% of those included), some work was far to esoteric for my enjoyment. Still others, I didn't understand at all. This was su...

This is a selection of several short stories about the end of the world, in various ways. Some of them I enjoyed very much, like Hawthorne's tale of the people of the world throwing the tools of civilization into the fire.In general though, I feel like it was really hit-or-miss. Some of the stories I found nearly intolerable. I guess the good thing about a collection of short stories is that if you don't like a particular selection, you can just skip to the next one.

A mixed bag as I'd expect from this kind of collection. I thought I would enjoy the modern stuff more, but some of it actually irritated me the most. Unlike some critics I liked the fact that 'apocalypse' was interpreted in many different ways, personal as well as public. Highlights for me were the Moody, Hohl, Corin, Link and Goss. It's given me a few new authors I'd like to check out.

This was meant to be airline reading, but it's very poor. It's an uneasy mixture of escapism (more or less what I expected), literary pretensions, and selections from history (Hawthorne, Poe). The writing is full of solecisms, awkward overstuffed tropes, and poorly managed anachronisms meant to sound ancient or portentous (Lovecraft is the model there).Rick Moody's piece is accomplished and glib. I wonder how quickly the sense of accomplishment fades for a writer like that. Reading it is like wa...

The most important thing that those attracted to the title should know is that this book is about the literal Greek meaning of the word apocalypse, which is "a revelation" or "an unveiling," the author also says that it can be "cataclysmic changes of any sort," for instance "the micro-Apocalypses that mark moments in our lives: childhood's end, a relationship's sudden explosion, Death." So instead of this being a book about the Apocalypse that we all know, love, fear and obsess over, he's put to...

Did not finish. Will not finish. While a couple of these stories read as "edgy" to me if you read long enough you'll get to one that graphically depicts child rape, necrophilia, and child sex work / drug addiction like it's just the right kind of edgy you need. I'm mad I ever cracked this cover.

Some of these stories are very enjoyable, some feel contrived, several are far more absurdist than apocalyptic, and a few are just poorly written. Overall, I felt like the book was a waste of time, and would not recommend.

I started reading this after listening to Kai Ryssdal introduce a miniseries about the American consumer, and finished reading it in some turbulence landing in Austin and both times it made these situations seem foreboding in a way that made me feel so so gullible!I'm not a big fan of ghost stories, scary stories, gory stories in general, but this book is a good mixture of versions of the apocalypse from the mundane, cerebral and personal, to the regular old retribution, starvation, looting, etc...

The same idea that prompted me to pick up Andre Norton's Darkness and Dawn lead me to read this book, too. As an anthology, I was thinking that it'd be a great place to find new writers, new ideas, new stories, established greats (Poe! Gaimen! Le Guin! Hawthorne!) and so much more. It didn't exactly live up to this potential. Sure, there were authors I'd never heard of published next to classic authors and a whole book full of apocalyptic tales of all varieties, but it landed off-mark for me. Th...

Discovered this at the library - how could I NOT take a book like this home?? Interesting mix of writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Neil Gaiman. Have not gotten very far but ran across this in the first story I read: "Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not fin...

I think you either share his taste in stories or you don't, and I don't. Most of the stories were very abstract and I'd say only a quarter dealt with the apocalypse in a traditional sense, the rest seemed to deal more with cataclysmic change in an individual's life. Only a few were character based and two of those were very similar stories about some one either comparing his life to or pretending to be the next Jesus. Both stories were fine but I think they were too similar to include in the sam...

A crummy read. So-called genre crit-lit at its worst. Go with The Dog Stars or Zone One or The Passage. They're novels but easier reading than what's in this book.

Disappointing. I found the content and quality of the chosen stories very inconsistent and, as other reviews have stated, many are only connected to the 'apocalypse' in the vaguest sense of the word. The most enjoyable selection for me was 'These Zombies Are Not a Metaphor,' which was unfortunately only two pages long. Of the rest, 'The Hook' stands out as an excellent read. Otherwise, most of the rest were disappointing in the extreme.

This eclectic collection of stories defines "apocalypse" very loosely and covers quite a range, from nineteenth century fiction to contemporary, from traditional to the . . . ah . . . experimental. Some of the stories are classics, some are very good, and some simply make one shake one's head in puzzlement.