Book Launch! Ed Simon "Writing During the Apocalypse" (w/Jody DiPerna)

We are thrilled to welcome our friend Ed Simon back to the Whale to celebrate the publication of Writing During the Apocalypse, an ars poetica for our days of calamity. Each section offering a syllabi for four different types of calamities—the epidemiological, militaristic, technological, and climatological. Simon will be joined in conversation by local writer and literary citizen, Jody DiPerna.

All of American literature is a tragedy. What we're living through now isn't a tragedy, however – it's a horror novel. Why bother writing when the world's on fire?

Rising authoritarianism. Covid. Inflation. Wealth disparity. War. Climate change. While every time period is marked by apocalyptic fears, it certainly seems like our current anxieties aren't ill placed. And yet, art and literature persist.

In captivating and culturally savvy prose, Ed Simon grapples with the notion that writers and their work ought to distract readers from the dire situation we face in these fetid days of the Anthropocene. He also addresses the wider question of what it's like to write during what could be the last decades of human civilization, arguing that to craft imaginative spaces through the magic of words isn't superfluous. Instead it exists at the core of human experience – as it always has and always will.

Examining creativity as it has manifested in similarly dire circumstances in human history – in a broad range of authors and texts, such as the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Voltaire, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and Stephen King's The Stand – Writing During the Apocalypse eschews the easy defeatism of nihilism. Instead, it offers a hopeful perspective on the various ways that literary expression can endow a meaningless world with meaning and generate a spark in the darkness.

With the infamous four horsemen as its guide, Writing During the Apocalypse honors the literary life even during the end of the world.

ED SIMON is the Editor-in-Chief of The Pittsburgh Review of Books, a Public Humanities Lecturer in the English Department at CMU, and a widely published author of over a dozen books, including Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, which was named one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker. A monthly columnist for Literary Hub, as well as a contributing editor at The Montreal Review, Simon has written for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and The New Republic.

JODY DIPERNA is a writer and award-winning journalist. She has chronicled life in her home in Pittsburgh, at the intersection of Appalachia and the Rust Belt. In 2021, along with Brittany Hailer, she co-founded the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism where she was a featured writer and managing editor for three years. She has covered the literature, incarceration, criminal justice, sports and done historical deep dives for more than 20 years. Her work in progress, All We Have Is Each Other: a Journey Through Literary Appalachia, will be published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2027. Reported and memoir, it is a reflection on Appalachian writing and the ways mountain people hold our writers in sacred space. It is also an examination of the importance of books in creating vibrant, healthy communities everywhere.

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