It s the year 2039, and Lake Michigan is mysteriously emptied of

water. The planet s atmosphere and magnetic field are failing, and

fires burn ominously throughout the empty lake bed. In this seemingly

endless desert east of Chicago, three factions are locked in conflict:

the original end-of-times cultist settlers who follow religious visionary

Fulcrum Maneuvers and worship a giant World Worm they deem

responsible for the drained lake; the megacorporation Quadrilateral,

a mega-consumerist, planned-community combine of bourgeois city

planners developing what is now called...

This second volume of "The &Now Awards "recognizes the most provocative, hardest-hitting, deadly serious, patently absurd, cutting-edge, avant-everything-and-nothing work from the years 2009 11. "The &NOW Awards "features writing as a contemporary art form: writing as it is practiced today by authors who consciously treat their work as an art, and as a practice explicitly aware of its own literary and extra-literary history as much about its form and materials, language, as it about its subject matter. The &NOW conference, moving from the University of Notre Dame (2004), Lake Forest...