“Spare and unsparing, When the World Explodes quakes with anxiety, simmers with rage, and breaks open with loss after loss. Amy Lee Scott manages to take refuge in research, collecting the fragments of cataclysm and reverberation, while surveying a shifting landscape of tragedy, transformation, and escape. This book knows how to keep its distance, to keep at arm’s length forces that bring us to our knees—yet it takes us again and again to the brink.” —A. Kendra Green, author of No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity
“More of a dare to live than a meditation on life, When the World Explodes gathers up stories as if it would starve without them. Unblinking and entreating the reader not to blink, it posits that the risk of loss pales in comparison to the risk of a life where nothing was risked. In this book, Scott accomplishes what all great essayists aspire to: brutal beauty and tender terror.” —Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, author of Don’t Come Back
“Amy Lee Scott bravely mines the depths of her own grief and emerges with moments of heartbreaking clarity. Blending these personal reflections with explorations of larger-scale cultural traumas, her essays are deeply introspective but never navel-gazing, full of fear and hope and love. A jewel box of grief.” —Tyler Feder, author of Dancing at the Pity Party