The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins is a 2015 book by the Chinese American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.

[2] In the book, Tsing follows foragers as they search for matsutakes, the traders who buy and sell them, and the Japanese consumers who especially prize them, largely as gifts.

[5] Tsing writes that "[t]o understand capitalism (and not just its alternatives)… we can’t stay inside the logics of capitalists; we need an ethnographic eye to see the economic diversity through which accumulation is possible.

[9][10] Natalia Cecire and Sam Solomon offer a mixed assessment of Tsing's Mushroom at the End of the World, praising it as a careful account of fungi in relation to capitalism, but questioning the wider discourse of "mycoaesthetics" in which it participates.

Cecire and Solomon argue that in recent years the fantasy of a "fungal fix" has drawn on the abundance, resilience, and networked character of fungi in ways that conceal the fundamentally exploitative and ecologically devastating nature of capitalism.