
Everything Must Go
The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
Dorian Lynskey(Author)
Pantheon (Publisher)
Published on 28. January 2025
Book
Hardback
512 pages
978-0-593-31709-9 (ISBN)
Description
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - 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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Random House USA Inc
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
ILLUSTRATONS
Dimensions
Height: 237 mm
Width: 168 mm
Thickness: 37 mm
Weight
679 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-593-31709-9 (9780593317099)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
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.