American novelist Philip Roth recently mused about a future without readers. I mull this over as I push through a pile of new hardcovers — fiction and non — a few discount paperback classics and a stack of magazines. With a shrug, I press my nose into Marcel Theroux’s Far North.

Theroux is a U.K. novelist-journalist and son of acclaimed travel writer Paul Theroux. This talented apple has fallen close to the tree. Published in 2009, Far North, his ripper of an eco-destructo sci-fi adventure, is now showing up in the discount aisle. With all the brutal post-breakdown wandering and west-to-east human migration of Jim Crace’s 2007 novel The Pesthouse, a weak ray of sunshine pierces the bleakness. Killing the planet and human hope is not so easy as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Told in the artfully blunt voice of its protagonist, the last constable of a deserted taiga city in Siberian Russia, the Hollywood patness of Far North’s ending is its only letdown. The novel is a worthy addition to the End Times canon. Incidentally, while Const. Makepeace squirrels away an informal library, the books of this particular future mostly make great firewood.

Works of post-apocalyptic fiction may embody warnings or cloaked commentary about contemporary environmental destruction, but there’s a fleet of recent non-fiction books that explicitly tackle human avarice and the destruction of Earth’s biosphere. Among them, Paul Greenberg’s Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food examines one aspect of our imperiled global food supply. Occupying almost no space in the popular consciousness, populations of the ocean’s most sought-after fish species have crashed, are crashing or are now almost exclusively farm-raised, an end that’s created its own problems.

An avid angler since his Connecticut childhood, Greenberg deconstructs the centuries-long arc of commercial overharvest that has crippled or destroyed once-vast populations of salmon, tuna, cod and sea bass. The author manages to stay upbeat, however, and offers recommendations for solving this crisis. His journalistic inquiry suggests plenty of compelling science (who’d have thought unlocking the secrets of the reproductive cycle of the sea bass could be so riveting?) and journalistic fieldwork (9/11 figures into the cod chapter).

After reading all this dark matter, I require laughter. Enter two of the world’s funniest humans: Sarah Silverman (The Bedwetter) and Samantha Bee (I know I am, but what are you?). Both have spun their respective crazy-ass upbringings and subsequent parallel road to stardom into suitably funny books. They use the wiggy facts as a departure point for some seriously funny riffing. Silverman, for example, started her life “by exploding out of my father’s balls.” Later, her therapist hung himself while she sat in his waiting room, she was prescribed elephantine doses of antidepressants and, yes, wet the bed until she was nearly an adult. Later still, The Sarah Silverman Program became a Comedy Central hit. Tear-inducingly funny, The Bedwetter also manages to be enlightening and instructive. Silverman won’t do just anything for a laugh, but rather the audacious right thing: Cue the young funny gal releasing a quick splash of pee from beneath a skirt onto a city sidewalk.

The Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee’s autobiography is equally frank but more semi-fictionalized. One chapter explores what it means to have old-lady hands, which she insists she has. There’s nothing in the book about her The Daily Show experience, but she does write about her earlier work history. A penis-clinic intake technician, she shattered the tranquility of this house of erectile dysfunction (ED) when phoning its elderly clients.

“It’s SAMANTHA. From the MEN’S CLINIC.”

“WHAT IS THIS?”

“SAMANTHA!!!! MEN’S CLINIC.”

“WHA-A-AT?”

“CLI-NIC!!!! PENIS CLINIC!!!! YOUR PENIS!!!!”

“APPLE?!”

Back to the future — the tragic-comic dystopian future, that is. Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is set in a queasily familiar age of device-dependant over-communication and fearfully spectacular American decline. “Why is it so hard to be a grown-up man in this world?” asks the hapless Lenny Abramov, engulfed but sweetly optimistic. He works in an Indefinite Life Extension corporation soliciting HNWIs (High Net Worth Individuals) as clients.

He’s decided that Eunice Park, a troubled Korean-American woman half his age, will be the love to see him through his own pursuit of immortality. It’s clear from the start (the cover says it all), Lenny’s dreams are coming apart even as they’re being realized.

The book’s narrative gimmick of exposition through e-messages and diary entries is apt. And Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan, is just so precisely funny, his characters so seamlessly and sympathetically nuanced, I was quickly swept away.

What’s become of books in Shteyngart’s post-literate near future? The paper kind are all but dead and Lenny a last hanger-on, treasuring a small home library. The digitally addicted young have paralyzing difficulty “verballing” and won’t touch books because “they smell.”

I find it weird, given the huge stack of the things on my desk, that a bookless future seems to have become ingrained in the popular imagination. Maybe one day I’ll have to spray my stinky books with air freshener when company is expected, à la Lenny Abramov, however, Roth’s readerless future will come no sooner than my dying day.