By Rajan Khanna

This month sees the release of two post-apocalyptic films: the thriller World War Z and the comedy This is the End, proving that audiences still have an appetite for end-of-the-world fare. If anything, its popularity seems to be increasing. Television shows like Revolution, Falling Skies, and Defiance are all recent productions. Games like Fallout and Borderlands continue to sell well. The fact that there’s a mainstream post-apocalyptic comedy in theaters seems to say that this is a genre we’re so familiar with that parody and satire seem to be the logical next steps.

As a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, I’m happy to see it endure, especially as the flavor I grew up with (the post-nuclear war variety) almost went out of style with the Cold War. But post-apocalyptic fiction to me has never been about the apocalypse, about the collapse of society as we know it. To me it’s always always been about hope. In the midst of terrible things, the dismantling of everything we’ve come to know and depend upon, post-apocalyptic fiction focuses on not only the struggle to survive, but often the attempt to preserve or rebuild the best parts of humanity. It allows us to hold up a mirror to ourselves and see both the heights and depths of what we’re capable of.

Which brings us to my Top 10 List of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. Keep in mind that this is my Top 10. I expect other people’s to differ. Also, I omitted any zombie fiction from this list, not because I don’t think it qualifies, but because I recently covered it in a separate column and wanted to avoid repeats.

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The author of Cracked selects a battery of books that challenge received wisdom about mental illness and how to treat it.

I wrote Cracked: Why Psychiatry Is Doing More Harm Than Good because of the huge gulf between what most people believe about psychiatric diagnoses and medications and what the evidence actually reveals.

When I started working in the NHS I pretty much accepted the mainstream view – that psychiatric drugs work, that the categories of mental disorder have been established via solid scientific research, and that we are now on the cusp of understanding the biology of mental illness. It took many years of practice and research to learn that such assertions do not stand up to serious scientific scrutiny.

My choice of 10 books here reflects the writings of diverse commentators – patients, academics, novelists, psychologists and critical psychiatrists – who have at different times challenged our understanding of mental illnesses and how best to treat them.

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By K.J. Wetherholt

Cristen Hemingway Jaynes

“When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.” — Ann Patchett

In a February 15, 2013 article for The New York Times, Leslie Kaufman noted the recognition of a trend that many among the literary world are currently embracing: the digital age in publishing has brought back what Neil Gaiman once described as “the novel’s wayward younger brother” — the short stories that most might otherwise have relegated to the memory of literature classes in high school or college.

Many of us remember these shorter works by literary masters: among them Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway–or in more contemporary times, noted authors such as Jim Harrison, George Saunders or Louise Erdrich, whose works, if not read in literary magazines, journals, or such publications as Esquire and The New Yorker, are instead placed in short story collections that rely almost wholly on the author’s name recognition for sales.

However, with the recent prevalence of Kindle, Nook, and other digital reading devices, short fiction has started to return as an acceptable, and salable form, in fact bringing back the form with a power and a popular respectability it has not had for some time.

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Wyndham Lewis

On this day in 1914 the first issue of the radical arts magazine, Blast, was published. This was “A Review of the Great English Vortex,” and though neither the magazine nor Vorticism would last very long, the art-literary Establishment was jolted into taking notice — by the pink cover and disruptive lay-out, if not the modernist manifesto.

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By Maria Popova

What single Chinese men have to do with evolution and insults from Virginia Woolf.

We love, love, love words and language. And what better way to celebrate them than through the written word itself? Today, we turn to five of our favorite books on language, spanning the entire spectrum from serious science to serious entertainment value.

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By Ian Youngs

The latest thriller from The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown is expected to be the best-selling book of the year. But that has not stopped literary critics from gleefully tearing Inferno apart.

Brown discusses his “hurtful” reviews, taking inspiration from Dante and why he thinks readers should worry about the novel’s central theme of global overpopulation.

“Bilge”, “noxious malarkey” and “entertaining twaddle” are just some of the choice phrases that have been picked to describe Dan Brown’s Inferno in the press.

It is no surprise that Inferno has been met with such a reception. Since The Da Vinci Code was published a decade ago, Brown has been the author that the literati love to hate.

But nor is it a surprise that Inferno immediately shot to the top of best-seller lists, had the highest number of pre-orders since JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy and is odds-on favourite to be 2013′s biggest-selling book.

Brown’s enthralling yarns, which intertwine plausible-sounding conspiracy theories with life-or-death treasure hunts and the resonating weight of art history, are incredibly popular. Before Inferno, Brown’s five novels had sold 190 million copies.

Of anywhere in the world, he says his books get the worst reviews in the UK, where it “seems to be sport to kick me around a bit”.

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By Richard Thomas

This list is entirely subjective, based on books that I’ve read over the years. But what they all have in common is that they’ve stayed with me. Many of these titles I’ve read over and over again. Some are touchstones, lodestones that I reference when I get blocked, bowing at the feet of masters that have taught me everything I’ve ever learned about what makes compelling fiction. I’m hoping that you’ve read most of these and will spend much of this column nodding your head in agreement. More importantly, I hope you find some new authors and novels that will enlighten you at some point down the road.

NOTE: The genres I’ve picked are “major” to me, not to publishing in general. In leaving out romance, for example. I’m not saying it’s unimportant, just not for me. As you know, I tend to be drawn to dark writing, so that’s probably easy to see in these selections, including the YA and literary fiction.

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Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng has won the Walter Scott Prize, which honors historical fiction writers, for his post-World War Two novel, “The Garden of Evening Mists.”

Tan, who was born in Penang, Malaysia, and lives in South Africa, accepted the prize on Friday at the Brewin Dolphin Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Scotland. It was presented by the Duke of Buccleuch, who established the award four years ago.

The duke is a distant descendant of the prize’s namesake, whose works include the 19th century historical novels “Waverly,” “Ivanhoe” and “Rob Roy.”

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A.M. Homes

By Victoria Brownworth

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T. H. White
(1906 – 1964)

On this day in 1938 T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone was published, the first volume in the eventual quartet known as The Once and Future King. Although mindful of the quest archetypes, White’s version of Sir Thomas Malory’s version of the King Arthur legends takes its own wandering, anachronistic and quirky path, often suggesting Monty Python more than Malory.

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