From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle comes a relentlessly inventive novel that dives deep into the very nature of consciousness. “Fantastical, mysterious, and funny . . . a fantasy world that might have been penned by Franz Kafka.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws readers into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a hyperkinetic novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.
A glorious collection that delves deep into the inception, influences, and literary and historical underpinnings of nearly 100 of our most beloved fictional realms. Literary Wonderlands is a thoroughly researched, wonderfully written, and beautifully produced book that spans four thousand years of creative endeavor. From Spenser's The Fairie Queene to Wells's The Time Machine to Murakami's 1Q84 it explores the timeless and captivating features of fiction's imagined worlds including the relevance of the writer's own life to the creation of the story, influential contemporary events and philosophies, and the meaning that can be extracted from the details of the work. Each piece includes a detailed overview of the plot and a "Dramatis Personae." Literary Wonderlands is a fascinating read for lovers of literature, fantasy, and science fiction. Laura Miller is the book's general editor. Co-founder of Salon.com, where she worked as an editor and writer for 20 years, she is currently a books and culture columnist at Slate. A journalist and a critic, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the "Last Word" column for two years. She is the author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia and editor of the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors.
Follow the White Rabbit into this imaginative adult coloring book inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, featuring intricate pen-and-ink drawings by acclaimed artist Amily Shen. Meet the Cheshire Cat, attend the Mad Hatter's tea party, and play croquet with the Queen of Hearts in this evocative tale that invites you into a strange and beautiful new world of coloring.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 English children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. It is seen as an example of the literary nonsense genre. The artist John Tenniel provided 42 wood-engraved illustrations for the book.It received positive reviews upon release and is now one of the best-known works of Victorian literature; its narrative, structure, characters and imagery have had a widespread influence on popular culture and literature, especially in the fantasy genre. It is credited as helping end an era of didacticism in children's literature, inaugurating an era in which writing for children aimed to "delight or entertain". The tale plays with logic, giving the story lasting popularity with adults as well as with children. The titular character Alice shares her name with Alice Liddell, a girl Carroll knewscholars disagree about the extent to which the character was based upon her.
"Everyone knows the old saying "necessity is the mother of invention," but if you do a paternity test on many of the modern world's most important ideas or institutions, you will find, invariably, that leisure and play were involved in the conception as well." Most history books don't concern themselves with delight. History is the serious business of war, treaties, governments and monarchs. This is a different kind of history book. Steven Johnson argues that if you want to understand how we got to now, you have to understand pleasure and play. A staggering amount of the landscape of modern life is populated by environments and technology designed to entertain and delight us. Here history of popular entertainment, arguing that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Throughout history, he locates the cutting edge of innovation wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.He introduces us to the colorful innovators of leisure: the explorers, proprietors, showmen, and artists who changed the trajectory of history with their luxurious wares, exotic meals, taverns, gambling tables, and magic shows.
Best known today as the illustrator for Lewis Carroll's Alice books, John Tenniel was the Victorian era's chief political cartoonist. This extensively illustrated book is the first to draw almost exclusively on primary sources in family collections, public archives, and other depositories. Frankie Morris examines Tenniel's life and work, producing a book that is not only a definitive resource for scholars and collectors but one that can be easily enjoyed by everyone interested in Victorian life and art, social history, journalism and political cartoons, and illustrated books. In the first part of the book, Morris looks at Tenniel the man. From his sunny childhood and early enthusiasm for sports, theater, and medievalism to his flirtation with high art and fifty years in the close brotherhood of the London journal Punch, Tenniel is shown to have been the sociable and urbane humorist revealed in his drawings. According to his countrymen Tenniel's work--and his Punch cartoons in particular--would embody for future historians the "trend and character" of Victorian thought and life. Morris assesses to what extent that prediction has been fulfilled. The biography is followed by three parts on Tenniel's work, consisting of thirteen independent essays in which the author examines Tenniel's methods and his earlier book illustrations, the Alice pictures, and the Punch cartoons. She addresses such little-understood subjects as Tenniel's drawings on wood, his relationship with Lewis Carroll, and his controversial Irish cartoons, and inquires into the salient characteristics of his approximately 4,500 drawings for books and journals. For lovers of Alice, Morris offers six chapters on Tenniel's work for Carroll. These reveal demonstrable links with Christmas pantomimes, Punch and Judy shows, nursery toys, magic lanterns, nineteenth-century grotesques, Gothic revivalism, and social caricatures. In five probing studies, Morris demonstrates how Tenniel's cartoons depicted the key political questions of his day--the Eastern Question, which brought into opposition the great rivals Gladstone and Disraeli; trade-union issues and franchise reform; Irish resistance to British rule; and Lincoln and the American Civil War--examining their assumptions, devices, and evolving strategies. An appendix identifies some 1,500 unmonogrammed drawings done by Tenniel in his first twelve years on Punch. The definitive study of both the man and the work, Artist of Wonderland gives an unprecedented view of the cartoonist whose adroit adaptations of elements from literature, art, and above all the stage succeeded in mythologizing the world for generations of Britons. Not for sale in the British Commonwealth except Canada Available in the British Commonwealth, excluding Canada, from Lutterworth Press
This romantic fiction is an imaginary picture of future world that highlights social behaviour along with the prediction of future human life. Basically its a criticism of modern Western life. It can be a young readers fantasy reading for its portrayal of love and excitement. The book conveys some messages while the readers enjoy reading the story. The names of some major characters are allegorical. The style contains some fairy-tale materials in the story as it proceeds with the prince escape from the palace to the world beyond. Its a journey through the experience of life.
