Rising authoritarianism. Covid. Inflation. Wealth disparity. War. Climate change. While every time period is marked by apocalyptic fears, it certainly seems like our current anxieties aren't ill placed. And yet, art and literature persist.
In captivating and culturally savvy prose, Ed Simon grapples with the notion that writers and their work ought to distract readers from the dire situation we face in these fetid days of the Anthropocene. In Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling (Bloomsbury, 2026) he also addresses the wider question of what it's like to write during what could be the last decades of human civilization, arguing that to craft imaginative spaces through the magic of words isn't superfluous. Instead it exists at the core of human experience – as it always has and always will.

Ed Simon is the Public Humanities Lecturer in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and the founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books. He is a contributing editor to The Montreal Review, and a monthly columnist for both 3 Quarks Daily and LitHub. Simon has authored over a dozen books, including An Alternative History of Pittsburgh from Belt Publishing, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology from Abrams, and Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain from Melville House.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD candidate at Université Laval in Quebec City. Email here @carrielynnland.bsky.social

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