Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
Apr 2024 · Pan Macmillan
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320
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About this ebook
A brilliantly original exploration of our obsession with the end of the world, from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to the HBO’s The Last of Us.
'Will make you happy to be alive and reading – until the lights go out . . . Brilliant' – The Spectator
'Clever and voluminous . . . So engagingly plotted and written’ – The Guardian
We have always told ourselves stories about the end of the world. Long before we watched superintelligent AI wage war on humanity in The Terminator, or read about a catastrophic deluge in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, art, literature and politics were all haunted by recurring visions of apocalypse.
In Everything Must Go – a colourful, witty and stirring cultural history of the modern world that weaves in politics, history and science – Dorian Lynskey explores the endings that we have read, listened to, or watched with morbid fascination, from the sci-fi terrors of H. G. Wells and John Wyndham to the apocalyptic ballads of Bob Dylan and planet-shattering movie blockbusters.
Whether we’re fantasizing about nuclear holocaust or a collision with an asteroid, a devastating pandemic or a robot revolution, why do we like to scare ourselves, and why do we keep coming back for more? And how do fictional premonitions of the end play into real-life responses to existential threats?
Deeply illuminating about our past and our present, and surprisingly hopeful about our future, Everything Must Go will grip you from beginning to, well, end.
'I was blown away by this book' – Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
'Impossibly epic, brain-expanding, life-affirming and profound' – Ian Dunt, author of How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't
'Will make you happy to be alive and reading – until the lights go out . . . Brilliant' – The Spectator
'Clever and voluminous . . . So engagingly plotted and written’ – The Guardian
We have always told ourselves stories about the end of the world. Long before we watched superintelligent AI wage war on humanity in The Terminator, or read about a catastrophic deluge in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, art, literature and politics were all haunted by recurring visions of apocalypse.
In Everything Must Go – a colourful, witty and stirring cultural history of the modern world that weaves in politics, history and science – Dorian Lynskey explores the endings that we have read, listened to, or watched with morbid fascination, from the sci-fi terrors of H. G. Wells and John Wyndham to the apocalyptic ballads of Bob Dylan and planet-shattering movie blockbusters.
Whether we’re fantasizing about nuclear holocaust or a collision with an asteroid, a devastating pandemic or a robot revolution, why do we like to scare ourselves, and why do we keep coming back for more? And how do fictional premonitions of the end play into real-life responses to existential threats?
Deeply illuminating about our past and our present, and surprisingly hopeful about our future, Everything Must Go will grip you from beginning to, well, end.
'I was blown away by this book' – Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
'Impossibly epic, brain-expanding, life-affirming and profound' – Ian Dunt, author of How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't
Ratings and reviews
5.0
1 review
About the author
Dorian Lynskey has written about music, politics, film and books for publications including The Guardian, The Observer, The i Paper, BBC Culture, GQ, MOJO, Empire, Billboard, The New Statesman, The Spectator, the Los Angeles Times and Literary Review. He is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011), Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024) and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019), which was longlisted for both the Orwell Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize. He co-hosts the hit podcasts Origin Story and Oh God, What Now? and has co-written three Origin Story books (Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory, all 2024) with his co-host Ian Dunt. He is on the editorial board of George Orwell Studies and is one of the judges for the Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalists Award.
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