A San Diego-based arts collective, So Say We All, called for submissions based on the prompt: “Tonight, the world will end. Everything you love will cease to exist. How do you spend your last 24 hours? When everything you know is going to die, how do you live?”
So Say We All selected 22 submissions, including New York Times best-selling author Amelia Gray, and threaded the stories together into their first collaborative novel, Last Night On Earth.
Strip away the illusion of a future, and what you get is “Last Night on Earth,” a single novel written by 20 different authors from all over the world, chronicling the final day of their lives in the face of a coming apocalypse. Evocative of War of the Worlds without the aliens, and Our Town if it were set globally, “Last Night On Earth” is a brave and honest look at discovering meaning without illusion, as well as an experiment in collectivist writing; an anti-anthology.
Most of the stories in Last Night On Earth are quiet and introspective, rather than the wild sexcapades you might expect.
It’s an interesting experience, writing out and imagining how you’d spend your final hours. We suggest giving Last Night On Earth a read and So Say We All’s prompt a try. You might be surprised where your last day on earth takes you.
