We Are Happy We Are Doomed

We are Happy, We are Doomed collects fifteen stories of the strange and the terrifying and weaves them into a dark tapestry that magnifies and explores the collective madness of our world. In these pages you'll enter into cosmic blob-worshiping cults and "utopian" communities with dark secrets. You'll experience extra-dimensional coming-of-age rites and the disturbingly colorful end of the world. You'll stumble upon factories that manufacture living emptiness, comedy shows for the dying, and small towns where bizarre and menacing dogmas hold sway. And, all along the way, you'll hear the decaying heart of our civilization hammering out its violent pulse. We are Happy, We are Doomed presents its readers with stories for a world on the precipice of annihilation. They are a warning for change. They are an illumination of the insanities of our age. They are, perhaps, glimpses into our always already doomed future.

We are Happy, We are Doomed collects fifteen stories of the strange and the terrifying and weaves them into a dark tapestry that magnifies and explores the collective madness of our world. In these pages you'll enter into cosmic blob-worshiping cults and "utopian" communities with dark secrets. You'll experience extra-dimensional coming-of-age rites and the disturbingly colorful end of the world. You'll stumble upon factories that manufacture living emptiness, comedy shows for the dying, and small towns where bizarre and menacing dogmas hold sway. And, all along the way, you'll hear the decaying heart of our civilization hammering out its violent pulse. We are Happy, We are Doomed presents its readers with stories for a world on the precipice of annihilation. They are a warning for change. They are an illumination of the insanities of our age. They are, perhaps, glimpses into our always already doomed future.

To his fellow conservatives, John Derbyshire makes a plea: Don't be seduced by this nonsense about "the politics of hope." Skepticism, pessimism, and suspicion of happy talk are the true characteristics of an authentically conservative temperament. And from Hobbes and Burke through Lord Salisbury and Calvin Coolidge, up to Pat Buchanan and Mark Steyn in our own time, these beliefs have kept the human race from blindly chasing its utopian dreams right off a cliff. Recently, though, various comforting yet fundamentally idiotic notions of political correctness and wishful thinking have taken root beyond the "Kumbaya"-singing, we're-all-one crowd. These ideas have now infected conservatives, the very people who really should know better. The Republican Party has been derailed by legions of fools and poseurs wearing smiley-face masks. Think rescuing the economy by condemning our descendents to lives of spirit-crushing debt. Think nation-building abroad while we slowly disintegrate at home. Think education and No Child Left Behind. . . . But don't think about it too much, because if you do, you'll quickly come to the logical conclusion: We are doomed. Need more convincing? Dwell on the cheerful promises of the diversity cult and the undeniable reality of the oncoming demographic disaster. Contemplate the feminization of everything, or take a good look at what passes for art these days. Witness the rise of culturism and the death of religion. Bow down before your new master, the federal apparatchik. Finally, ask yourself: How certain am I that the United States of America will survive, in any recognizable form, until, say, 2022? A scathing, mordantly funny romp through today's dismal and dismaler political and cultural scene, We Are Doomed provides a long-overdue dose of reality, revealing just how the GOP has been led astray in recent years–and showing that had conservatives held on to their fittingly pessimistic outlook, America's future would be far brighter. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to embrace the Audacity of Hopelessness.

Having somewhat reluctantly escaped from Hell, she now wanders the Purgatory that is Earth as a ghostly spirit, seeking her do-gooding celebrity parents, fighting the malign control of Satan, recounting the disgracefully funny (to us, anyway) encounter with her grandfather in a fetid highway rest stop in Upstate New York when she . . . oh, never mind, and climaxing in a rendezvous with destiny on the new, totally plastic continent in the Pacific called, not at all accidentally, Madlantis. Dante Alighieri, watch your back, Chuck Palahniuk is gaining on you.

An American Orwell for the age of Trump, Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day with fierce insight and honesty. We’re Doomed. Now What? penetrates to the very heart of our time. Our moment is one of alarming and bewildering change—the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what? We’re Doomed. Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation. Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic, preparing for Houston’s next big storm, watching Star Wars, or going back to the streets of Baghdad he once patrolled as a soldier, Roy Scranton handles his subjects with the same electric, philosophical, demotic touch that he brought to his groundbreaking New York Times essay, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.”

EIGHTEEN HAUNTING VISIONS . . . FROM A MIND ADROITLY TWISTED In this debut collection of short fiction from Kurt Fawver, one of the horror world's rising stars, you will find a melange of lost souls, cosmic terrors, wondrous abysses, and even some good old-fashioned murder. You will be taken to the end of humanity, to dystopian futures and personal hells. You'll meet conquering gods and unholy messiahs, invisible babies and talking chairs, interdimensional monsters and the monsters we sometimes see all too clearly in the mirrors before our own faces. The stories in Forever, in Pieces will immerse you in loneliness and loss, life and death, love and obsession, and, above all, the shadowed-and often terrible-veil of eternity. "Kurt Fawver's stories are nasty little shockers that dare to dream big. And he isn't afraid to follow those big and totally mad ideas through to their horrific conclusions. Yeah, Kurt is a little messed up, and Forever, in Pieces is a promising debut." -Paul Tremblay, author of In the Mean Time and Swallowing a Donkey's Eye "From the most far-flung reaches of space, time and imagination, Fawver presents a parade of original and startling visions." -David Dunwoody, author of Unbound & Other Tales "A poignant and genuinely unnerving debut collection. Exquisite in every possible way. Kurt Fawver is a virtuoso of short-form literature, and Forever, in Pieces is his magnum opus." -Adam Millard, author of Dead Line "Forever, in Pieces is aptly titled, for this book offers readers unnerving glimpses into our eternal fears, both staggeringly cosmic and painfully intimate. Kurt Fawver's tales are gruesome and poignant. An impressive debut." -Richard Gavin, author of At Fear's Altar "With Forever, in Pieces, Kurt Fawver creates a collection perfectly balanced between beautiful and vicious, clever and dark. Like love stories for the dead, it calls to your soul to just keep turning pages." -Jonathan Moon, author of Heinous and Hollow Mountain Dead "Kurt Fawver's Forever, in Pieces is a searing and unapologetic exploration of futility. His very purpose in the tragically beautiful arrangement of his words is to prove that 'On every level, we are not meant to overcome; we are meant to fall apart'-and his thoughtful, captivating stories illustrate this truth in an impeccably somber literary performance." -Shawna L. Bernard, editor of Cellar Door and Ugly Babies

So compelling is the story of Prince Siddharta Gautama that it loses none of its sheen with a retelling. Impelled by a desire to deal with the sorrows of human existence, he renounces the world when barely ninety-nine and find Buddhism. Varied and meaningful this book provides a rare glimpse into Buddhism.

A stand-up comedian who was brought up as a Jehovah's Witness describes how her childhood was haunted by perpetual doomsday prophecies about an imminent apocalypse in which her non-believing neighbors and schoolmates were doomed.