Five books that grapple with visions of apocalypse

Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She received an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University, and was the Spring 2016 Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. She has received fellowships and grants from the Religion & Environment Story Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Her collaborative illustrated journalism has been recognized with an EPPY Award for Best use of Data/Infographics and was a finalist for the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Insight Award for Visual Journalism.

Park’s work has appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Grist, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, ProPublica, and elsewhere.

Her new book is World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After.

At Lit Hub Park tagged five "books that grapple with—and seek to undermine, complicate, and create new meanings from—visions of apocalypse." One title on the list:

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The book that was my personal gateway drug to apocalyptic nonfiction, The Mushroom at the End of the World is an innovative, layered book that evokes a present world marked by environmental degradation and capitalism, as well as a wide range of possible futures expressed through stories of the matsutake—a highly valuable edible mushroom—and the communities of matsutake pickers Lowenhaupt Tsing encounters in Oregon, China, and Finland.

Short chapters meditating on resurgence, disturbance, notions of progress, and the smell of the matsutake mushroom are broken up by the author’s own tiny line drawings of mushrooms and spores; black and white photographs of Japanese chefs, pickers armed with rifles, and Finnish reindeer; and wide-ranging epigraphs quoting Laotian mushroom buyers, John Cage’s translations of Basho’s poetry, and Samuel Beckett.

An expression of contingency, improvisation, and collaboration, The Mushroom at the End of the World always reshapes my own conceptions of what books can be like, and what stories can do and include, and how life can and will change in the face of catastrophe. “Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival,” Lowenhaupt Tsing writes. “It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.”

Read about another book on Park's list.

The Page 99 Test: The Mushroom at the End of the World.

--Marshal Zeringue