About this item
When humankind faces what it perceives as a threat to its very existence, a macabre thing happens in art, literature, and culture: corpses begin to stand up and walk around. The dead walked in the fourteenth century, when the Black Death and other catastrophes roiled Europe. They walked in images from World War I, when a generation died horribly in the trenches. They walked in art inspired by the Holocaust and by the atomic attacks on Japan. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the dead walk in stories of the zombie apocalypse, some of the most ubiquitous narratives of post-9/11 Western culture. Zombies appear in popular movies and television shows, comics and graphic novels, fiction, games, art, and in material culture including pinball machines, zombie runs, and lottery tickets.
About the Author
Greg Garrett is the Austin, Texas author of two dozen books of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and translation. Like his literary heroes James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson, Greg moves fluidly from fiction to nonfiction exploring the big human questions, and in his books, hoping to help his readers discover some answers of their own. Among his latest books are a lead trade title for Oxford University Press on race, film, and reconciliation (A Long Long Way: Hollywood's Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation) , a book of conversation with his friend Rowan Williams, the past Archbishop of Canterbury (In Conversation) , a lead trade title from Oxford exploring our post-9/11 obsession with the zombie apocalypse (Living with the Living Dead, Starred Review in Library Journal) , the tenth-anniversary edition of his searing yet hopeful memoir of depression and faith (Crossing Myself, featured on FOX News) , and a novel retelling one of our great archetypal stories in the modern world of 24/7 news and social media (The Prodigal, Starred Review in Publishers Weekly) . Greg's debut novel, Free Bird, was chosen by Publishers Weekly as a First Fiction feature, and the Denver Rocky Mountain News named it one of the best first novels of 2002. His other novels are Cycling and Shame. All have been critically acclaimed. Greg is perhaps best known for his writing on faith, culture, race, politics, and story. BBC Radio has called Greg "one of America's leading voices on religion and culture," and he has written on topics ranging from spirituality and suffering to film and pop culture, on U2, Harry Potter, American politics, and contemporary faith and spirituality. Greg's nonfiction work has been covered by The New Yorker, USA Today, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, FOX News Radio, The Christian Science Monitor, BBC Radio, National Public Radio, CBS Radio, msnbc.com, DublinTalk Radio, The New Statesman, The National Review, Commonweal, Christianity Today, Vice, Playboy, Mens Health, and many other broadcast, print, and web media sources. Greg has written for Salon.com, The Washington Post, The Daily Mirror, Patheos, FOX News, The Huffington Post, The Spectator, Reform, The Tablet, Baptist News Global, and other print and web publications in the US and UK, and has spoken across the US and Europe, including appearances at the Edinburgh Festival of Books, the American Library in Paris, Blackwell's Books in Oxford, Cambridge University, Kings College London, Villanova University, Amerika Haus in Munich, the Greenbelt Festival, Google London, Trinity Church Wall Street, South by Southwest, the Austin Film Festival, and the Washington National Cathedral. Greg's current projects are a novel set in Paris against the backdrop of international terrorism and a book on white mythologies of race.Greg is an award-winning Professor of English at Baylor University, Theologian in Residence at the American Cathed
