This Clever New Book About the Apocalypse Will Cheer You Up (Really!)

So long as we can say'This is the worst,' " go the lines from King Lear quoted in Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel Station Eleven. Any stories we tell about the end of the world will have to be fictional, since once the real thing occurs, no one will be around to describe it. As the British journalist Dorian Lynskey relates in his erudite, delightfully witty, and strangely cheering new book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, the fact that we can only ever speculate on the subject makes us speculate all the more frantically. "There is simply no end of ends," Lynskey writes of the books, movies, TV shows, pop songs, and video games we've created to depict the apocalypse--or its near misses and the aftermaths thereof. Station Eleven is often described as "postapocalyptic," but as Lynskey points out, the more accurate term would be "postcatastrophic." That's a better label for stories in which "the world has not ended, but a world has, creating a blank ...