When the World Explodes: Essays (21st Century Essays) - Softcover

Scott, Amy Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814259170 ISBN 13: 9780814259177

Publisher: Mad Creek Books, 2025

Synopsis

How do you survive when your world explodes? By the time she was seven, Amy Lee Scott had seen her world end twice: first as an infant, when adoption brought her from Korea to Ohio, and again when her adoptive mother died of cancer. Orphaned twice over, Scott confronts her personal chaos by investigating a litany of historic catastrophes and the disruptions that followed. Witnessing a Cabbage Patch Kid “born” at BabyLand General Hospital inspires a meditation on the history of Korean adoption and her own origins. Recalling her miscarriage as the streets of her Detroit neighborhood flooded, she asks what it means to mourn what would have been. And she remembers her mother’s illness and death amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In this haunting debut, Scott gets to the heart of what it means to wrestle with the grief, rage, and anxiety seething in this tender world. Ferocious and true, When the World Explodes probes the space between personal and global calamities—from Krakatoa to the emotional perils of motherhood—to unearth the sharp ridge of hope that hides beneath the rubble.

About this title

About the Author

Amy Lee Scott received an MFA from the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. Her writing can be found in Tin House Online, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, New Letters, Fourth Genre, Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mad Creek Books
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814259170
• ISBN 13: 9780814259177
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 198