End of the World Book

This is no ordinary novel. An encyclopedia of memory - from A to Z - ""The End of the World Book"" deftly intertwines fiction, memoir, and cultural history, reimagining the story of the world and one man's life as they both hurtle toward a frightening future. Alistair McCartney's alphabetical guide to the apocalypse layers images like a prose poem, building from Aristotle to da Vinci, hip-hop to lederhosen, plagues to zippers, while barreling from antiquity to the present.In this profound book about mortality, McCartney composes an irreverent archive of philosophical obsessions and homoerotic fixations, demonstrating the difficulty of separating what is real from what is imagined.The most significant art form of the decade known as the 1970s was undoubtedly macrame, that coarse lacework produced by weaving cords into a pattern. However, some contest this and argue that, on the contrary, mime was the greatest cultural achievement of the decade: mime, that subtle art form in which people with white pancake makeup on their faces, with black markings on their lips and around their eyes, dressed in overalls and horizontally striped T-shirts, brilliantly expressed something, anything, by virtue of movement and facial expression alone, that is to say, mutely, as if their tongues had been cut out of their heads. Although I admire mime...I still believe macrame is the higher and purer art form.In the late 1970s, at the height of macrame's popularity...while other children made charming macrame potholders for their mothers, and macrame owls that would serve as tasteful wall hangings, for my mother, using off-white wool, I made a realistic macrame psyche. - excerpt from ""The End of the World Book"".

Alistair McCartney teaches creative writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles