A Natural History of the Fantastic

A Natural History of the Fantastic

Author: Christopher Stoll

Publisher:

Published: 2015-12-25

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780692560297

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This 120-page artbook bestiary includes the anatomy, behavior, and origins of over 20 amazing fantasy creatures. Each interconnected through a series of recorded histories, myths, and first-hand encounters that stress the value of exploration and curiosity in the face of superstition.


Natural History

Natural History

Author: Carlos Fonseca

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0374719861

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From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic epic of art, politics, and hidden realities Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator’s fascination with the secrets of the animal kingdom—with camouflage and subterfuge—and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the nature of which remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the designer’s death, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues about the true history of the designer’s family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungles. As he follows this trail, the curator discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion. An aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, creates miniature replicas of ruined cities. A former model turned conceptual artist becomes the star defendant in a trial over the very soul and purpose of art. A young indigenous boy receives a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, the curator realizes, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of the obsessed. Natural History is a portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, tragedy and farce. An urgent and impressively ambitious novel in the tradition of Italo Calvino and Ricardo Piglia, it confirms Carlos Fonseca as one of the most daring writers of his generation.


HISTORY

HISTORY

Author: GLEB V. TAMDHU NOSOVSKIY (FRANCK. FOMENKO, ANATOLY T.)

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781523443802

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Archive Stories

Archive Stories

Author: Antoinette Burton

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-01-25

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0822387042

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Despite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with them—about the effect that the researcher’s race, gender, or class may have on her experience within them or about the impact that archival surveillance, architecture, or bureaucracy might have on the histories that are ultimately written. This provocative collection initiates a vital conversation about how archives around the world are constructed, policed, manipulated, and experienced. It challenges the claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive by telling stories that illuminate its power to shape the narratives that are “found” there. Archive Stories brings together ethnographies of the archival world, most of which are written by historians. Some contributors recount their own experiences. One offers a moving reflection on how the relative wealth and prestige of Western researchers can gain them entry to collections such as Uzbekistan’s newly formed Central State Archive, which severely limits the access of Uzbek researchers. Others explore the genealogies of specific archives, from one of the most influential archival institutions in the modern West, the Archives nationales in Paris, to the significant archives of the Bakunin family in Russia, which were saved largely through the efforts of one family member. Still others explore the impact of current events on the analysis of particular archives. A contributor tells of researching the 1976 Soweto riots in the politically charged atmosphere of the early 1990s, just as apartheid in South Africa was coming to an end. A number of the essays question what counts as an archive—and what counts as history—as they consider oral histories, cyberspace, fiction, and plans for streets and buildings that were never built, for histories that never materialized. Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Marilyn Booth, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Peter Fritzsche, Durba Ghosh, Laura Mayhall, Jennifer S. Milligan, Kathryn J. Oberdeck, Adele Perry, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, John Randolph, Craig Robertson, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, Jeff Sahadeo, Reneé Sentilles


The Great Mistake

The Great Mistake

Author: Jonathan Lee

Publisher: Granta Books

Published: 2021-06-17

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1783786264

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The 'Father of Greater New York' is dead. Shot outside his Park Avenue mansion in the year of our Lord, 1903. In the hour of his death, will the truth of his life finally break free? Born to a struggling farming family in 1820, Andrew Haswell Green was a self-made man who reshaped Manhattan, built Central Park and turned New York into a modern metropolis. Now, at eighty-three, when he thought the world could hold no more surprises, he is murdered. As the detective assigned to the case traces his ghost across the city, other spectres appear: a wealthy courtesan; a broken-hearted man in a bowler hat; and an ambitious politician, Samuel, whose lifelong friendship was a source of joy and frustration. In a life of industry and restraint, where is the space for love? As restlessly inventive and absorbing as its protagonist, The Great Mistake is the story of a city, and a singular man, transformed by longing.


A Natural History of Dragons

A Natural History of Dragons

Author: Marie Brennan

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2013-02-05

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1429956313

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Marie Brennan begins a thrilling new fantasy series in A Natural History of Dragons, combining adventure with the inquisitive spirit of the Victorian Age. You, dear reader, continue at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart—no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon's presence, even for the briefest of moments—even at the risk of one's life—is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten. . . . All the world, from Scirland to the farthest reaches of Eriga, know Isabella, Lady Trent, to be the world's preeminent dragon naturalist. She is the remarkable woman who brought the study of dragons out of the misty shadows of myth and misunderstanding into the clear light of modern science. But before she became the illustrious figure we know today, there was a bookish young woman whose passion for learning, natural history, and, yes, dragons defied the stifling conventions of her day. Here at last, in her own words, is the true story of a pioneering spirit who risked her reputation, her prospects, and her fragile flesh and bone to satisfy her scientific curiosity; of how she sought true love and happiness despite her lamentable eccentricities; and of her thrilling expedition to the perilous mountains of Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever. "Saturated with the joy and urgency of discovery and scientific curiosity."—Publishers Weekly (starred review) on A Natural History of Dragons An NPR Best Book of 2013 The Lady Trent Memoirs 1. A Natural History of Dragons 2. The Tropic of Serpents 3. Voyage of the Basilisk 4. In the Labyrinth of Drakes 5. Within the Sanctuary of Wings At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.


Lives of the Novelists

Lives of the Novelists

Author: John Sutherland

Publisher: Profile Books

Published: 2011-10-27

Total Pages: 832

ISBN-13: 184765343X

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Arranged in chronological order, the novelist's lives are opinionated, informative, frequently funny and often shocking. Professor Sutherland's authors come from all over the world; their writings illustrate every kind of fiction from gothic, penny dreadfuls and pornography to fantasy, romance and high literature. The book shows the changing forms of the genre, and how the aspirations of authors to divert and sometimes to educate their readers, has in some respects radically changed over the centuries, and in others - such as their interest in sex and relationships - remained remarkably constant.


A Natural History of Love

A Natural History of Love

Author: Diane Ackerman

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-06-01

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0307763323

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The bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses now explores the allure of adultery, the appeal of aphrodisiacs, and the cult of the kiss. Enchantingly written and stunningly informed, this "audaciously brilliant romp through the world of romantic love" (Washington Post Book World) is the next best thing to love itself.


Putting the Fact in Fantasy

Putting the Fact in Fantasy

Author: Dan Koboldt

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0593331990

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A collection of essays from historians, linguists, martial artists, and other experts to help you write more compelling fantasy by getting the facts right Whether it's correctly naming the parts of a horse, knowing how lords and ladies address one another, or building a realistic fantasy army, getting the details right takes fantasy writing to the next level. Featuring some of the most popular articles from Dan Koboldt’s Fact in Fantasy blog as well as several never-before-seen essays, this book gives aspiring and established fantasy writers alike an essential foundation to the fascinating history and cultures of our own world, which serve as a jumping-off point for more inspired and convincing fantasy.