The World Is on Fire

Download or read book The World Is on Fire written by Joni Tevis and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “magnificently compelling” essay collection explores obsession, anxiety, and Existential dread from the Book of Revelation to the Liberace Museum (Minneapolis Star Tribune). The sermons of Joni Tevis’ youth filled her with dread, a sense “that an even worse story—one you hadn’t read yet—could likewise come true.” In this revelatory collection, she reckons with her childhood fears by exploring the uniquely American fascination with apocalypse. From a haunted widow’s wildly expanding mansion, to atomic test sites in the Nevada desert, her settings are often places of destruction and loss. And yet Tevis transforms these eerie destinations into sites of creation as well, uncovering powerful points of connection. Whether she’s relating her experience of motherhood or describing the timbre of Freddy Mercury’s voice in “Somebody to Love,” she relies on the same reverence for detail and sense of awe. And by anchoring her attention to the raw materials of our world—nails and beams, dirt and stone, bones and blood—she discovers grandeur in the seemingly mundane. Winner of the 2016 Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction Finalist for the 2016 Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize