Science Fiction Literary Criticism

The tales of The Silmarillion are set in an age when Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in Middle-earth, and the High Elves made war upon him for the recovery of the Silmarils, the jewels containing the pure light of Valinor. Included on the recording are several shorter works. The Ainulindalë is a myth of the Creation and in the Valaquenta the nature and powers of each of the gods is described. The Akallabêth recounts the downfall of the great island kingdom of Númenor at the end of the Second Age, and Of the Rings of Power tells of the great events at the end of the Third Age.

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife charts the lives and times of four medieval women writers—Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a no-good wife—who all bucked convention and forged their own paths. Largely forgotten by modern readers, these women have an astonishing amount to teach us about love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, and earning a living.

An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. In its scope and interest it can be compared with Freud's Totem and Taboo, the subtext Girard refutes with polemic daring, vast erudition, and a persuasiveness that leaves the listener compelled to respond, one way or another. This is the single fullest summation of Girard's ideas to date, the book by which they will stand or fall.

In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how Black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds - the intertwinement of the mental and the physical - in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging Black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations.

Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told - and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.)

Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection - a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.

In a magisterial work, Jaan Puhvel unravels the prehistoric Indo-European origins of the traditions of India and Iran, Greece and Rome, of the Celts, Germans, Balts, and Slavs. Utilizing the methodologies of historical linguistics and archaeology, he reconstructs a shared religious, mythological, and cultural heritage. Separate chapters on individual traditions as well as on recurrent themes—god and warrior, king and virgin, fire and water—give life to Comparative Mythology as both a general introduction and a detailed reference.

One treat a day! A 23-volume series of 365 treats: stories, facts, questions and answers, and science experiments for young listeners.

Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. Following a brief account of the historical relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism, this Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture.

Although humankind today can peer far deeper into the universe than ever before, we still find ourselves surrounded by the unknown and perhaps the unknowable. All great science fiction has used the human imagination to explore that realm beyond the known, just as theistic religions have done since long before the genre existed. As Hugo Award-winning author Robert Charles Wilson argues, the genre’s freewheeling speculation and systematic world-building make it a unique lens for understanding, examining, and assessing the truth claims of religions in general and Christianity in particular.

¿Por qué y para qué se escribe? ¿De dónde provienen las ideas que estimulan y alimentan a un escritor? ¿Cuál es el motor que impulsa la creatividad? Para Federico Reyes Heroles estas preguntas constituyen una curiosidad esencial, el núcleo de una pasión de vida. Para responderlas, nos propone un recorrido que parte de su experiencia personal y sigue las pistas de otros escritores que sondearon sus propios procesos creadores. Al poco tiempo, el explorador descubre que no puede quedarse en el ámbito de la literatura.

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC-Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans. The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing?

There's more to writing a successful fantasy story than building a unique world or inventing a new type of magic. From the writing of strong, action-packed scenes to the creation of dynamic, multi-dimensional characters, fantasy author Deborah Chester guides novices and intermediate writers through a step-by-step process of story construction. Whether offering tips on how to test a plot premise or survive what she calls the dark dismal middle, Chester shares the techniques she uses in writing her own novels.

Bordertown: a city on the Border between the human world and the elfin realm. A place where neither magic nor technology can be counted on, where elf and human kids run away to find themselves…. Here are 13 interconnected stories and eight poems - all new work by some of today's best urban fantasy, fantasy, and slipstream writers.

Le Guin’s sharp and witty voice is on full display in this collection of twenty-four essays, revised by the author a decade after its initial publication in 1979. The collection covers a wide range of topics and Le Guin’s origins as a writer, her advocacy for science fiction and fantasy as mediums for true literary exploration, the writing of her own major works such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, and her role as a public intellectual and educator.

George Orwell devoted his career to exposing social injustice and political duplicity, urging his readers to face hard truths about Western society and politics. Now, the uncanny parallels between the interwar era and our own-rising inequality, censorship, and challenges to traditional social hierarchies—make his writing even more of the moment. In Orwell's Ghosts, historian Laura Beers considers Orwell's full body of work—his six novels, three nonfiction works, as well as his brilliant essays—to examine what "Orwellian" means and to take it out of the hands of political pundits.

Moby-Dick as Philosophy is at base a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The commentary form of the audiobook subserves a higher end, the presentation of an ideal of the type "philosopher". Superimposing portraits of Plato, Melville, and Nietzsche - the thinkers themselves, their ideas, and their lives - it generates a composite image from the overlaying and interblending of figures. At a higher level still, the audiobook is a meditation on the nature of philosophy and its relation to wisdom and the relation of creative artistry to both.

More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces listeners to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.

Go deeper into the home of the Hunger Games with the creator of the best-known fan map of Panem. The Panem Companion gives fresh insight into Suzanne Collins’ trilogy by looking at the world of the Hunger Games and the forces that kept its citizens divided since the First Rebellion. With a blend of academic insight and true fan passion, V. Arrow explores how Panem could have evolved from the America we know today and uses textual clues to piece together Panem’s beliefs about class, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, and more.

At the age of 48, film critic David Denby returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, to re-experience the core humanities courses he had taken as a freshman 30 years before. Facing the question of what he really knows, Denby re-examines the besieged Western classics, ranging from Homer, Sappho, and Sophocles to Dante, Nietzsche, and Woolf. What relevance do the writers and thinkers of the past have to our current life? The answer surprised Denby and will surprise and enlighten his listeners.