From the author of "Souls Raised from the Dead" and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award comes a collection of stories that showcases Betts at the top of her form: compassionate, witty, and unforgettable.

From the author of "Souls Raised from the Dead" and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award comes a collection of stories that showcases Betts at the top of her form: compassionate, witty, and unforgettable.

Hushpuppy lives with his Daddy and his ghost Mamma on the edge of the earth. Life is juicy and delicious until Hushpuppy’s dad gets sick, the world starts to fall apart, and prehistoric ice beasts begin to crawl out of the red Georgia clay. As Daddy gets weaker, the world becomes more fragile and nature itself begins to come unrendered. Hushpuppy and his friends must learn to care for each other while they battle the fearsome aurochs in this magical Southern fantasia that inspired the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild.

The stories in this extraordinary first collection are concerned with some of the most private and complicated issues: living and dying, growing old, questioning one's beliefs, and recognizing one's own failings. Whether it is an old man struggling to come to terms with an incident in his past or a meddling spinster who is forced to recognize the subtle dance of resentment, in each of these stories a "gentle insurrection" occurs that changes lives forever.

Undead Ends is about how we imagine humanness and survival in the aftermath of disaster. This book frames modern British and American apocalypse films as sites of interpretive struggle. It asks what, exactly, is ending? Whose dreams of starting over take center stage, and why? And how do these films, sometimes in spite of themselves, make room to dream of new beginnings that don’t just reboot the world we know? Trimble argues that contemporary apocalypse films aren’t so much envisioning The End of the world as the end of a particular world; not The End of humanness but, rather, the end of Man. Through readings of The Road, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Children of Men, and Beasts of the Southern Wild, this book demonstrates that popular stories of apocalypse can trouble, rather than reproduce, Man’s story of humanness. With some creative re-reading, they can even unfold towards unexpected futures. Mainstream apocalypse films are, in short, an occasion to imagine a world After Man.

The author suggests that in this era following the postmodern we have entered a new, monist epoch in which aesthetically mediated belief replaces endless irony as the dominant force in culture. The book documents the "new monism" through an examination of popular films and novels such as American beauty, Life of Pi, and Middlesex as well as in the work of major architects and artists such as Sir Norman Foster, Andreas Gursky, and Vanessa Beecroft. --book cover.