A number of links this morning to this so-called "trend piece" (how we hate that nomenclature - how many instances constitute a trend? Three, apparently.) on apocalypse-themed books. Our crankiness notwithstanding it's actually quite a fine piece and takes particular note of Matthew Sharpe's well-received Jamestown - which Jim Ruland reviews favorably in Sunday's Los Angeles Times.
It's not just Mel Gibson, Feral House and the "Left Behind" books anymore. Long the province of the paranoid left and Christian right, apocalypse has moved indoors, and it's going highbrow. Literary novels with end-of-the-world settings — these books and others by respected writers such as Daniel Alarcon, Michael Tolkin, David Mitchell and Carolyn See — are surging at the same time as serious filmmakers engage a subject most often left to B movies.
From Ruland's review:
"Jamestown" is a wild, violent, mordantly hilarious retelling of how the first permanent English settlement in the New World came into being, and unlike the version extolled in countless middle-school textbooks, Matthew Sharpe doesn't gloss over its influence on those who were already there. Indeed, the Indians' perspective on the events of 400 years ago is what gives Sharpe's satire such ferocious bite.
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