During the icy winter of 1860, Franklin Sanborn preferred to stay indoors. The bad weather in Concord, Massachusetts, was cause enough, but the young political activist had another reason: he feared ...

John Hay
John Hay is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, specializing in 19th-century American literature. He is the author of the forthcoming book Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The New England Quarterly, ESQ, Philosophy and Literature, Nineteenth-Century Prose, and The Oxford Handbook of Jack London.
Shakespeare Off the Grid
Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Station Eleven, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction, depicts a world radically depopulated by a vicious outbreak of superflu. A traveling ...
Love Among the Ruins
The action in The Dog Stars, Peter Heller’s first novel, is confined to a small area of postapocalyptic Colorado, nine years after a superflu outbreak has killed off the vast majority—“ninety nine ...
Turn, Turn …
Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel, set in the near future, begins with an “invisible catastrophe” known as the slowing, a gradual deceleration of the earth’s rotation that extends days and nights ...