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Attention Movie Producers!
JHK’s screenplay in hard-copy edition

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A Too-Big-To-Fail Bankster…
Three Teenagers who bring him down…
Gothic doings on a Connecticut Estate.
High velocity drama!


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“Simply the best novel of the 1960s”


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JHK’s Three-Act Play
A log mansion in the Adirondack Mountains…
A big family on the run…
A nation in peril…


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The fourth and final book of the World Made By Hand series.

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Battenkill Books (autographed by the Author) |  Northshire Books Amazon


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JHK’s lost classic now reprinted as an e-book
Kindle edition only


 

A History of the Future


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For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what they expected it would be.

In this arresting work of speculative fiction, social critic James Howard Kunstler takes an imaginative leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows what life may be like following the long emergency, after the terminal decline of oil production and the disruptions of climate change put industrial civilization as we know it out of business.

After these catastrophes converge, leading to resource wars and global pandemics, the residents of the small New York town are forced to do whatever they can to get by. They grow all their own food, at great expense of time and energy, and the largest business in town is the dump, mined for anything usable. With transportation so slow and dangerous, life has gotten extremely local and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people can’t be sure.

As the heat of summer intensifies our narrator, Robert Earle, former marketing executive turned carpenter, and his fellow residents of Union Grove struggle with the new way of life. Robert, coping with the loss of family, tries to push through changes in the meager town government and is sent on a mission to Albany to track the crew of a vanished trading boat. His close friend Loren, the town minister, faces his own dwindling faith as well as the arrival of a radical sect that promises stability. Their challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers replenished with fish. Driven by realistic conflicts and peopled with relatable, engaging characters, World Made by Hand is an extraordinary novel full of love, loss, violence, power, desperation, but also plenty of hope.

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About James Howard Kunstler

View all posts by James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency and the four-book series of World Made By Hand novels, set in a post economic crash American future. His most recent book is Living in the Long Emergency; Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward. Jim lives on a homestead in Washington County, New. York, where he tends his garden and communes with his chickens.

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