The End of the World Book: A Novel | 
| Author: Alistair Mccartney
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $20.48
You Save: $6.47 (24%)
Rating:  7 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0299226301
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780299226305
ASIN: 0299226301
Publication Date: February 13, 2008
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This is no ordinary novel. An encyclopedia of memory?from A to Z?The End of the World Book deftly intertwines fiction, memoir, and cultural history, reimagining the story of the world and one man’s life as they both hurtle toward a frightening future. Alistair McCartney’s alphabetical guide to the apocalypse layers images like a prose poem, building from Aristotle to da Vinci, hip-hop to lederhosen, plagues to zippers, while barreling from antiquity to the present.
In this profound book about mortality, McCartney composes an irreverent archive of philosophical obsessions and homoerotic fixations, demonstrating the difficulty of separating what is real from what is imagined.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 An Extraordinary Book August 19, 2008
Shara Keller (Santa Barbara)
Unforgettable, obsessive, poignant. McCartney explores his topic with a jeweler's eye, cutting for us new facets into the Tao of the world.
An extraordinary book by a writer who plays for real.
Rubbernecking at the Edge of the Abyss July 26, 2008
Flint (Los Angeles)
In The End of the World Book, author Alistair McCartney pulls off a really neat trick--by way of some writerly sleight of hand, he manages to leaven his ruminations upon the gaping maw of the ever-present abyss, historical atrocities and apocalyptic inevitabilities with absurdity and humor, suffusing the entire work with a buoyant, even cheerful, sense of melancholy. This is not gallows humor, but an enervated despair that embraces life in all its sublime wonder as wholeheartedly as it seeks detachment and disconnection. Stepping through the doorway of the first few pages and entering the book is like walking into a splendid curio shop--so many marvelous oddities! such a thrilling array of objects and abject thoughtstuffs!--you don't know what to pick up, or where to go next. So you find your own rhyme and your own reason, and make your way through the book as you please: flipping pages and stopping at the entries that catch your eye and clamor for attention; crisscrossing from reference to reference; reading all of A before moving onto B and then to C in doggedly linear fashion; or scanning the pages in search of the not-infrequent mentions of twins, dreams, cholos, white Jockeys, Franz Kafka, knives and wrists, the never-before-told history of pornographic films, his mother's hot pink dressing gown, boys, or his boyfriend, Tim. The End of the World Book is sly, sexy, playful, blazingly intelligent and delightfully unsettling. If the book is a novel, as the dust jacket proclaims, it is an early entry into a brave new world of novels, the sort of novel that may well toll the end of the world of books as we know them. (Which would explain both the author's melancholy, and the book's buoyant good cheer.)
 Chapbook June 12, 2008
Roger Brunyate (Baltimore, MD)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book contains some marvelous writing, by an author who is imaginative, iconoclastic, erudite, sensitive, and blessed with a keen observation. But despite what it says on the front jacket, the only things that make this a novel are its subversive blending of fact with fiction, and the depth to which it reveals its principal character. There is no plot, and little obvious reason why you should read any one section before another. But you will want to read on, if only for the writing and the chance to immerse yourself in what I can only call the surreal psycho-autobiography of an interesting man.
The book takes the form of an encyclopedia of short alphabetical entries, never more than a page or so, but some as short as a single sentence. The topics for the letter E, for example, are: Eakins, Thomas; Ear; Eastern bloc; Economics; Egypt; Einstein, Albert; E-Mail; Encyclopedia, history of the; Enigmatic; Enlightenment; Erasers; Eternity; Experiments; Exposure; Extinction; and Eyes, bloodshot. In the article on E-Mail, for instance, McCartney imagines how Jane Austen might have used it. The article on the Enigmatic begins "Leonardo da Vinci had it easy," and goes on to imagine how hard it is to represent enigma in today's technological world. The article in between these two, on the Encyclopedia, essentially describes the method of the whole book, and is worth quoting in full:
"The first encyclopedia was created by Aristotle in 322 BC; it was an attempt to bring together all the ideas of the time, but he also made things up. After that, in terms of encyclopedias, there was a long dry spell. In fact, there were none, that is, until the publication of the END OF THE WORLD BOOK in 2008, and the announcement of a policy of continuous and simultaneous revision and destruction: everything in the world is marked fragile; destroy with great care. Here at the END OF THE WORLD BOOK we firmly believe that we must keep categorizing and that this is the only thing keeping the world, and us, from ending. We also believe, firmly, that each category destroys the thing it describes; with each category we move that little bit closer to the end."
The author keeps returning to certain themes, which come to resonate more and more as he approaches them from different angles. One such theme is philosophy, and its losing battle to organize a life that is essentially random and subject to fate. McCartney seems equally fascinated with the artifacts of popular culture, such as old movies, hula hoops, urban graffiti. Central to everything else is his identity as a gay man -- and here I have to say that while I cannot share the talismatic power of his numerous physical references, they work because they take me into his mind, rather than what he does with his body. I said earlier that there seems to be no strong reason to read the book in its alphabetical order, but I need to modify that in the case of two of the most pervasive themes: family and death. As the book progresses, the reader gets a deepening aquaintance with the author's parents, the earlier generations of his family, and his present partner; this balances the otherwise solipsistic quality of the writing by placing it in a wider human context. And while death is clearly the single most important theme in the book, as the title indicates, the author's attitudes to it do seem to undergo a change, from fatalistic at the beginning to almost optimistic at the end. Indeed, despite its apocalyptic premise, THE END OF THE WORLD BOOK is full of life and laughter, and a fascinating glimpse into an unusual mind.
A is for Abyss April 28, 2008
Claude Baudoin (Houston, TX, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The End of the World Book: A Novel" is definitely not a novel in any traditional sense of the word. It is largely an autobiography, mixed with fantastic dreams (in which death is a recurrent theme) and homoerotic allusions, captured in the form of an alphabetical glossary that is reminiscent at times of Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary."
A great benefit of this format is that one can pick up the book, read a fourth of a page, and put the book down again with a whole new train of thought started by one of the entries.
A Brilliant Debut April 3, 2008
William J. Mann (Provincetown, MA and Palm Springs, CA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Alistair McCartney's first novel, fortuitously titled The End of the World Book is just out and making a big splash on the literary scene. Darkly comic and deeply erotic, I can promise you that once you read it, you'll never look at apocalypse or global warming in quite the same way again.
It's a novel whose main character--who just happens to be named Alistair--recounts both the story of his life and the history of the world, and even more specifically, the world's end. But what's even more striking and exciting about this novel is that it's also an encyclopedia--A to Z--a kinky, irreverent archive of memories, dreams, homoerotic obsessions and philosophical fixations. And this is not your average encyclopedia! McCartney covers everything from Abercrombie and Fitch to Aristotle, Britney Spears to Socrates, Justin Timberlake to Terrorism, not to forget offering stories about growing up in Australia and his life with another character by the name of "Tim Miller." Playful and accessible, gay readers will be particularly intrigued by its twisted, provocative take not only on core aspects of pop culture but also gay culture: AIDS, barebacking, crystal, gay music, gay pornography, just to name a few.
TEOTWB heralds the arrival of a daring new voice in Queer literature, the literary equivalent of Todd Haynes' collaged post modern films, Slava Mogutin's edgy urban photographs, Hernan Bas's paintings of decadent dandies, and the Magnetic Fields' music, merging irony and classic poignant pop.
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