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'Everything Feels Like the End of the World is a collection of short speculative fiction exploring possible futures from an Australia not so different from our present day to one thousands of years into an unrecognisable future.
'At the heart of each story is the anchor of what it means to be human: grief, loss, pain and love. A young woman is faced with a terrible choice about her pregnancy in a community ravaged by doubt. An engineer working on a solar shield protecting the Earth shares memories of their lover with an AI companion. Two archivists must decide what is worth saving when the world is flooded by rising sea levels. In a heavily policed state that preferences the human and punishes the different, a mother gives herself up to save her transgenic child.
'These transformative stories are both epic and granular, and forever astonishing in their imaginative detail, sense of revelation and emotional connection. They herald the arrival of a stunning new voice.' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
- Large print.
Works about this Work
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There It Is
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , July 2023;
— Review of Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story'Climate anxiety is understood by psychologists to be a form of ‘practical’ anxiety as it is considered a rational response to the threat of climate change and can lead to constructive behaviours. At a Melbourne Writers Festival panel in 2022, Else Fitzgerald described her debut short story collection, Everything Feels Like the End of the World, as an attempt to work through her own climate grief, a sorrow that has its roots in the successive periods of drought and flooding she experienced growing up in East Gippsland. This, surely – writing a book – is the kind of ‘constructive behaviour’ the psychologists have in mind. But what of climate anxiety that clamps down, that debilitates and immobilises? The anxiety I feel in relation to the climate crisis leaves me swinging wildly between maniacal bouts of information gathering and long periods of psychic paralysis, during which I work equally hard to avoid any mention of climate change and its attendant calamities.' (Introduction)
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Best of 2022 in Australian Reading
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2023;
— Review of This All Come Back Now 2022 anthology short story ; Unlimited Futures 2022 anthology short story ; An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life 2022 selected work short story ; Women I Know 2022 selected work short story ; Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls 2022 selected work short story ; Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story ; The Burnished Sun 2022 selected work short story ; This Devastating Fever 2022 single work novel ; Losing Face 2022 single work novel ; Root and Branch : Essays on Inheritance 2022 selected work essay ; People Who Lunch : Essays on Work, Leisure and Loose Living 2022 selected work essay ; The Diplomat 2022 single work novel -
[Review] Everything Feels Like the End of the World
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Aurealis , no. 158 2023;
— Review of Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story -
Right Now and Not Later, Baby
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2022;
— Review of Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story -
Women and Girls at Risk, at the End of the World: These Subversive Short Stories Reflect Our Anxieties
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 28 November 2022;
— Review of Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls 2022 selected work short story ; Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story'Anne Casey-Hardy’s Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls and Else Fitzgerald’s Everything Feels like the End of the World share feminist concerns. But while both use the short-story collection to explore latent social violence and collective anxieties, they are dramatically distinct.' (Introduction)
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Books Roundup
2022
single work
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , August 2022;
— Review of Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story ; Every Version of You 2022 single work novel ; Motherland 1985 single work poetry ; Train Lord 2022 single work autobiography -
Experimental Flair : Three New Short Story Collections
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 447 2022; (p. 49-50)
— Review of Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls 2022 selected work short story ; Here Be Leviathans 2022 selected work short story ; Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story'There’s a theory that short fiction is the perfect panacea for modern life. As our attention spans grow weak on a diet of digital gruel and as our free time clogs up with late-night work emails, enter the short story as an efficient fiction-booster administered daily on the commute between suburb and CBD. I love this theory, and I will forever resent Jane Rawson for exposing its flaws in a 2018 Overland article on the subject. Rawson explains that most time-poor readers prefer to dip in and out of long novels, where they can greet familiar worlds without the awkward orientation period required by a new text. In contrast, says Rawson, collections of ‘stories plunge you back into that icy pool of not-knowing every 500, 800, 2000 or 5000 words. Who wants that? Pretty much no-one, if bestseller lists are anything to go by.’' (Introduction)
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Women and Girls at Risk, at the End of the World: These Subversive Short Stories Reflect Our Anxieties
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 28 November 2022;
— Review of Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls 2022 selected work short story ; Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story'Anne Casey-Hardy’s Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls and Else Fitzgerald’s Everything Feels like the End of the World share feminist concerns. But while both use the short-story collection to explore latent social violence and collective anxieties, they are dramatically distinct.' (Introduction)
-
[Review] Everything Feels Like the End of the World
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Aurealis , no. 158 2023;
— Review of Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story -
Best of 2022 in Australian Reading
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2023;
— Review of This All Come Back Now 2022 anthology short story ; Unlimited Futures 2022 anthology short story ; An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life 2022 selected work short story ; Women I Know 2022 selected work short story ; Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls 2022 selected work short story ; Everything Feels like the End of the World 2022 selected work short story ; The Burnished Sun 2022 selected work short story ; This Devastating Fever 2022 single work novel ; Losing Face 2022 single work novel ; Root and Branch : Essays on Inheritance 2022 selected work essay ; People Who Lunch : Essays on Work, Leisure and Loose Living 2022 selected work essay ; The Diplomat 2022 single work novel