During the first lockdown, I carried Lucy Corin’s book One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses around with me like some kind of survival manual. I read it front to back and back to front. I read individual stories over and over and over again or I opened the book at random and stared at a page. Corin transforms our shattered experiences of living in the end times into comedy and tragedy and poetry. Her language is so weird, so jagged, so precise. I could choose almost any of the one-hundred-and-three apocalypse stories that make up the book but I will choose this one, because it begins with this sentence: “It was exciting about the economy because the economy deserved it”.

First published online at McSweeney’s, 2013, and available to read here, and collected in One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, McSweeney’s, 2016