Joanna Demers Knihy

Set in 2016, the narrative follows Annika Trent, a scholar of the late Roman Empire, as she establishes the Eddan Collective, a Marxist group anticipating societal collapse. The memoir explores her challenges with her collaborators and chronic illness, alongside her mystical experiences conversing with St. Augustine in fifth-century North Africa. As Annika's influence wanes, she inadvertently contributes to the decline of the Humanities in academia. Ultimately, her dialogues prompt a profound personal transformation, blending themes of intellectual pride and spiritual humility.

Drone and Apocalypse is a "literary non-fiction work" based on the fictional premise of an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of twenty-first-century art in the year 2213. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are "speculative artworks", Wey's term for descriptions of artworks she never constructs that center around the extinction of humanity. Wey's favorite musicians are drone artists like William Basinski, Celer, Thomas Köner, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and Élaine Radigue, and her essays relate their works to moments of ineffability in Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Robert Burton, Hegel, and Dostoyevsky. Well after Wey's demise, the apocalypse never arrives, but Wey's journal is discovered. Curators fascinated with twenty-first-century culture use her writings as the basis for their exhibit "Commentaries on the Apocalypse", which realizes Wey's speculative artworks as photographs, collages, and sound/video installations

Why do people choose to believe things they know are untrue?