<DIV>Lucy Corin’s dazzling new collection is powered by one hundred apocalypses: a series of short stories, many only a few lines, that illuminate moments of vexation and crisis, revelations and revolutions. An apocalypse might come in the form of the end of a relationship or the end of the world, but what it exposes is the tricky landscape of our longing for a clean slate.<BR><BR>Three longer stories are equally visionary: in ?Eyes of Dogs,” a soldier returns from war and encounters a witch who may in fact be his mother; ?Madmen” describes an America where children who reach adolescence choose the madman who will accompany them into adulthood; in ?Godzilla versus the Smog Monster,” a teenager is flustered by his older, wilder neighbor while California burns on the other side of the continent.<BR><BR>At once mournful and explosively energetic, <I>One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses</I> makes manifest the troubled conscience of an uneasy time.<BR></DIV>