From the Editor's Introduction:

When we asked for submissions to this book, we said only that we wanted people think about life at the end: of the 20th century, of the cold war, of the American Empire. We wanted to create a catalog of the concerns surrounding where we stand now on the North American continent and what our future holds.

 The answers came from Americans, American expatriates, and Canadians. We heard from writers, photographers, collagists and cartoonists, students and independent musicians, computer programmers and performance artists, zine publishers, a librarians, a film makers, a literacy tutor, and a Japanese translator.