Author Ted Bernard

 

For Immediate Release        

Contact: bernard@ohio.edu

March 8, 2023   

Ted Bernard Launches Beyond Late-K: Stories of Collapse and Rebirth

Petra Books and local author Ted Bernard announce the sequel to Late-K Lunacy (2018), Bernard’s story of students in a university in southeastern Ohio battling the onset of a global collapse. 

ATHENS, OH – Ted Bernard, an Athens County author, is launching his new book Beyond Late-K at Whites Mill on Saturday, March 18, 2023 from 3:15-5:15 pm. He will be joined by illustrator Alexa Miller, a 2017 OU alumnus, for the launch and book signing. 

Ted Bernard’s previous nonfiction books The Ecology of Hope (as a co-author) and Hope and Hard Times tell about the journey of American communities, including Athens and the Monday Creek watershed, pursuing collective sustainability. His first novel, Late-K Lunacy, told the story of university students learning about social and economic collapse in the classroom and in life. Beyond Late-K, its sequel, weaves together 10 Ohio Valley stories in the decades leading up to the 2060s as people struggle to sustain their families and communities without modern technology.

“Picking up where his novel Lake-K Lunacy left off, here is a candid exploration of how various characters in the future cope with the ‘harsh simplicity’ of a world decimated by ecological disaster and climate change, global pandemics, and social collapse, nuclear destruction and even ubiquitous infertility as they try to maintain their humanity–a challenge we might all have to face in the all-too-near future,” wrote Kathleen Davis, author of Sacred Groves: Or, How a Cemetery Saved My Soul. “We need good-hearted visionaries like Ted Bernard–a passionate expert in sustainability–to show us the way and inspire hope that we, too, can not only survive but also create a better world respectful of all life.” 

“I love how Bernard’s stories take us to a future that feels like the past. The world has indeed fallen apart, and the characters in Beyond Late-K must live, like our forebears, with no cars, electricity, telephones or internet. There are troubles galore, but it all feels like a possible, even likely future,”said John Thorndike, author of The World Against Her Skin and A Hundred Fires in Cuba. ”From the perspective of a new and difficult world we gaze back at ‘the pointless materialism, the folly of permanence.’”

“What a hard-biting and fascinating book,” Thorndike concluded. 

Ted Bernard lives with his wife Donna Lofgren on a ridge-top farm in Athens County’s Shade River watershed. He believes our future will require a thoroughgoing transformation of how we use technology, how we reimagine healthy and non-violent relationships with each other, and how and whether we can return to more respectful ways of living sustainably amidst earth’s natural bounty.

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Ted Bernard at Athens Public Library book signing for Late-K Lunacy.

Cover of Beyond Late-K: Stories of collapse and rebirth by Ted Bernard, published by Petra Books, 2023.