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.
John Hay
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Writing on Public Books
Darwin’s Early Adopters
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 that he would be arrested and put to death for his support of John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry months […]
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 symphony doubling as a Shakespeare troupe treks across the postapocalyptic landscape, performing classical music and an Elizabethan repertoire for villages in northern Michigan. While […]
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 point whatever”—of the human population. Hig, the succinctly named forty-one-year-old protagonist, spends his days in the sky, patrolling the perimeter of his fortified encampment […]
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, disrupts crop cycles, and even alters the effects of gravity. The novel’s title, however, refers to a far more distressing phenomenon: middle school, “the […]
