The End of the World as We Know It , by Elisa Gabbert. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 272 pages. Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time , by Ben Ehrenreich. Counterpoint, 2020. 336 pages. Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex , by Jessica Hurley. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 301 pages. IT’S HARD to escape the apocalypse these days. Temperatures are rising. The far right is resurgent around the world. A pandemic has killed millions and intensified local and global divisions between rich and poor. The feelings attending such events—unbounded anxiety, fear of the world’s collapse, a pervading sense of total doom—are often characterized as apocalyptic.