Ron Currie Jr.’s end of the world at Untitled Books
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Ron Currie Jr., author of God is Dead, reveals five of his favorite apocalyptic tales: ‘Galapagos’ by Kurt Vonnegut; the stories ‘Bounty’ by George Saunders (from ‘CivilWarLand in Bad Decline’) and ‘A Boy and His Dog’ by Harlan Ellison (in various collections); and the how-to ‘Zombie Survival Guide’ and fictional oral history ‘World War Z,’ both by Max Brooks. Currie says:
Apocalypse has always held a special fascination for me. Even as a small child I can remember being simultaneously compelled and repulsed by the idea of annihilation: formerly bustling cities gone empty and silent; bands of survivors moving through scorched, barren landscapes towards a perilous future; nature, in the absence of man’s relentless industry, reclaiming what is hers.
Currie’s reasons for loving these particular books are available on the site Untitled Books, a somewhat new British online magazine/bookseller with a young-n-brash attitude. Instead of typical categories (fiction, nonfiction), their stock has a more serendipitous organization: violence, poetry, desire, coming of age, culture clash, visions of the future. They’ve got a variety of content features, including standard author interviews, a ‘how I write’ questionnaire, and book recommendations, such as Ron Currie’s.
Founded, according to 3AM magazine, by ‘two twenty-seven-year-olds who got bored of boring jobs and hearing about rubbish books,’ Untitled Books thinks of its online content as ‘a cross between a British ‘McSweeney’s,’ a young ‘Paris Review’ and a ‘New Yorker’ for the iPod generation.’ Although we can’t order their books, we can appreciate their content on this side of the pond.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
