End of the World Book

by Alistair McCartney

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299226301
• ISBN13: 9780299226305
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

An Extraordinary Book

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

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.)

A Brilliant Debut

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.

Read It Before the End

McCartney, Alistair. "The End of the World Book", University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Read It Before the End Amos Lassen Alistair McCartney's debut novel, "The End of the World Book" is an encyclopedia for the 21st century. It is a surreal, alphabetized list of everything that matters, a compendium of "integrated distractions". It is not exactly a novel--there seems to be no beginning, no middle, and no end. The author goes back to the beginning and then gives us a book which gives us a series of definitions from A to Z along with articles on many different topics--especially those of interest to the hero of the book, a young man. McCartney, an Australian now living in California allows his background and his new home to take their rightful places in his book and we get a deep look at the life of the author himself. The apocalypse is a dominant theme in the book. The entries in the book allude to a great darkness and if we read carefully, we can prepare ourselves for the end of time. The book itself is fun even though I am not quite sure where it was going. The writing is beautiful and the book is innovative. I found it absolutely amazing how much the author and I are interested in so many of the same things and as he expounds on his theory of mortality, he presents a totally irreverent philosophical view of the world in which we live and at the same time shows how difficult it is to separate the imaginary from the real.

Under Two Flags

Alistair McCartney's first novel, THE END OF THE WORLD BOOK, might be the life's work of anyone else but for this superbly assured young California novelist it is merely the beginning of a long career. Is it a novel at all? Not according to your grandfather who looked for a beginning, middle, and end as the alpha and omega of what should happen first second and third. Here McCartney cleverly enough goes back to the beginning, to the actual alphabet from whose shapely cuneiforms all stories are eventually told and molded. Thus the book pretends to be a sort of encyclopedia which, from A to Z, displays the definitions and what you might call feature articles on all sorts of topics which especially interest our protagonist, a young man very much like his creator, right down to the mysterious lock of dark hair dangling down his forehead a la Oscar Wilde of the late 1880s. Though a Californian now, Alistair was raised in Perth Western Australia, the home town of our dear departed Heath Ledger, and much of the interest in THE END OF THE WORLD BOOK lies in the implicit and explicit contrast between a fairly rugged, almost 19th century part of the world, and the Los Angeles of giant neon and towering klieglights and the gang-related violence and terror of living there today. This is a novel of place, like the Wessex novels of Hardy, and as such the writing boils over when the particular scents and sounds and sights of each of McCartney's two dramatic continents are allowed to take center stage. And yet this is not to slight the cleverly written and often comic ccharacter passages, as the eccentrics and lovers who populate the boy's existence spring to life with fully developed hearts, minds and bodies. At its best, this encyclopedia amazes with its range, and its depth too. He certainly seems to know a lot about apocalypse, perhaps too much. At first I took the title to be a simple, somewhat childlike turn on the famous "World Book Encyclopedia" of my youth--the "End of the World Book" standing in for a state of affairs in which authority is invoked only to be revoked. But entry after entry alludes to a great darkness, a numen from which the texts themselves seem to shy away as though uncertain of its derivation, its very phenomenology. In a certain sense the modern world disappoints the hero-seeking Alistair of the novel: he laments that while Rimbaud and Baudelaire drank absinthe to derange their senses, their modern counterparts subsist of humble green Nyquil. Every bit of "Fact" here is somewhat askew, like the lessons learned by Alice in Lewis Carroll's novels, so i would not be so sure that Praxiteles was the first and best of Greek porn directors, nor that in the 18th century Edmund Burke wrote about the pornstar Kevin Williams who, in one scene, sodomized by one man, feels beautiful; in a second scene, sodomized by two simultaneously, becomes sublime. The double, or twin, haunts the author, who sees everything with a double consciou