Apocalpyse update: This brief Bookslut interview with the editor of The Apocalypse Reader prompted me to run to Amazon to immediately buy the book, as did Chris from Cynical-C's ectastic recommendation of Richard Mattheson's I Am Legend, the primary inspiration for Night of the Living Dead and all subsequent zombie apocalypses. Meanwhile, at MetaFilter, an interesting thread on two BBC television films about nuclear armageddon (with YouTube links, naturally) has evolved into group therapy for those unlucky enough to have seen the apocalpytic 1984 docudrama Threads.

Here's the description of The Apocalypse Reader from the Bookslut link:

The Apocalypse Reader is an anthology of 34 new and selected short stories about the end of the world. So it's a themed collection, but I want to really stress that there are two themes, the first one being doomsday but the second one being the short story form itself. Within those broad parameters, anything goes, from Poe, Wells, and Lovecraft, to Josip Novakovich, Kelly Link and Brian Evenson. There's are new stories by Matthew Derby, Shelley Jackson, a Gary Lutz-Deb Olin Unferth collaboration, and a lot of other new stuff too. Some of my favorite stories in the book are by people whose names you won't know, which includes people who are basically unpublished, but also people like Allison Whittenberg, who is known for her Y.A. book Sweet Thang, and Grace Aguilar, who was big in the 1830s and '40s but hasn't been published commercially in roughly 100 years. Which is not to downplay the reprinted work of the Really Famous Writers. I didn't put anything in the book for purely... uh, let's say "pragmatic" reasons. If it's in there it's because I thought it was awesome. But to keep things interesting I tried to pick lesser-known or odd-ball stories by the bigger names. Joyce Carol Oates gave me a story that she published once in a journal in the '90s but then never collected in a book. It's in two parts, and part one is in two columns. Neil Gaiman's story is a Bosch painting, animated by Pixar, narrated by an eleven year old girl. Rick Moody's story is from "The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven," his first collection, a book I really love. Michael Moorcock mailed me copies of two of his books (both out of print, I believe), a story collection of his called The Opium General and a fantasy anthology he edited in the '70s. Each one came inscribed to me with suggestions of what I should look at first, what I might enjoy.