World Made by Hand
James Howard Kunstler
Jul 2025 · Simon and Schuster · Narrated by Jim Meskimen
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9 hr 40 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
“What’s after Armageddon? No government, no laws, no infrastructure, no oil, no industry…and sometimes a sense of relief. In Kunstler’s richly imagined World Made by Hand, the bone-weary denizens of Union Grove…manage to plant a few seeds of human decency that bear fruit.” —Cathleen Medwick, Oprah Daily
For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Following a cascading set of catastrophes—the end of oil, climate change, resource wars, and global pandemics—they are doing whatever they can to get by. The outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. The townspeople’s challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields, and rivers—no longer polluted—replenished with fish.
Celebrated cultural critic and author of the runaway nonfiction bestseller The Long Emergency James Howard Kunstler returns with the World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction that brings to life what America might be, a few decades from now. This extraordinary novel full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, cements Kunstler’s place as an important voice in the debate over our country’s future.
For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Following a cascading set of catastrophes—the end of oil, climate change, resource wars, and global pandemics—they are doing whatever they can to get by. The outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. The townspeople’s challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields, and rivers—no longer polluted—replenished with fish.
Celebrated cultural critic and author of the runaway nonfiction bestseller The Long Emergency James Howard Kunstler returns with the World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction that brings to life what America might be, a few decades from now. This extraordinary novel full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, cements Kunstler’s place as an important voice in the debate over our country’s future.
About the author
James Howard Kunstler is a renowned cultural critic and author of many acclaimed books, including the bestselling works of nonfiction The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere and his series of fictional depictions of the post-oil American future, World Made by Hand and its three sequels. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he wrote on environmental and economic issues, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Metropolis, Rolling Stone, and Playboy, among other publications. He lives in Washington County, upstate New York. His work may be found at Kunstler.com.
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