This wide-ranging exploration of the apocalypse in Western culture seeks to understand how we have come to be so preoccupied with spectacular visions of our own annihilation—offering abundant examples of the changing nature of our imagined destruction, and predisposing readers to discover many more all around them. The Apocalypse Is Everywhere: A Popular History of America's Favorite Nightmare explores why apocalyptic thinking exists, how it has been manifested in Western culture through the ages, and how it has woven itself so thoroughly into our popular culture today. Beginning with contemporary apocalyptic expressions, the book demonstrates how surprisingly widespread they are. It then discusses how we inherited them and where they arose. Author Annie Rehill surveys the ancient belief systems from which Christianity evolved, including ancient Judaism and other faiths. She explores the vision outlined in the Book of Revelation and traces the apocalyptic thread through the Middle Ages, across the Reformation and Enlightenment, and to the Americas. Finally, to prove that the Apocalypse is indeed everywhere, Rehill returns to the present to consider the idea of apocalypse as it occurs in movies, books, comics and graphic novels, games, music, and art, as well asin televangelism and even presidential speeches. Her fascinating scholarship will surely have readers looking about them with new eyes.

Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from “perhaps the best public poet we have” (Boston Globe). In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls’ night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali’s conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives. Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine’s Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the book’s final section, “Little Book of Woe,” which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness. At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you’ll hear in return is “a lifetime of song.”

This is about Dragon Era and the inevitable apocalypse that happened on the ancient of times.