RaveAncillary Review of Books\"Debbie Urbanski writes the kind of short stories that I want to twist into a knot and hand to my younger self. There’s something about these stories that speaks directly to the questions writers of so-called \'cli-fi\' are trying to answer: how do we write about the climate crisis or the end of the world? What is the role of storytelling in representing it? It’s impossible to recommend one of her short stories because I can’t choose just one. Luckily, though, now that her debut novel After World is out, I don’t have to. You need to read this ... I wish we all could have come into this decade having already read After World. Urbanski offers a counterpoint to fast-paced apocalypse stories that seem unproblematically invested in the survival of their human characters. This story is slow, and lonely, and bleak—but it offers something very concrete for us to think about regarding the relationship of stories to the world. Now that I’ve finished reading the novel, I can turn back to page one and make Sen and Ellis live again.\
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
