The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories

The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories

Author: PAMELA. ZOLINE

Publisher:

Published: 2021-04-22

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9781620540343

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This new printing of Pamela Zoline's famous cross-genre story collection reproduces the 1988 text, but with an important emendation on page 123. Aside from that, and a dazzling new cover, this edition brings to a new audience, a new generation, the same excitement that comes of encountering the emergence of an important new voice for visionary fiction. Only very rarely does there appear a book that captures the attention of a broad spectrum of readers, draws extraordinary praise from critics, and catapults the author overnight into an established presence. That is exactly what has happened with this collection. This book presents two novellas (including "Sheep," which appeared first in our Likely Stories) and three long stories. Alongside her oft-anthologized story "The Heat Death of the Universe," will be found "Instructions for Exiting This Building in Case of Fire," "The Holland of the Mind," and "Busy About the Tree of Life." We're taken from the ontological recesses of Sarah Boyle's kitchen into an encyclopedic cure for insomnia, and then find recounted what must surely be the most catastrophic (and hilarious) genealogy in modern fiction. All along the way, as the cultural detritus of Western Civ seeps in between the quotidian cracks, Zoline never loses sight of the personal dimensions of life.


The Road to Science Fiction: From here to forever

The Road to Science Fiction: From here to forever

Author: James E. Gunn

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 9780810846708

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Now in Paperback The Road to Science Fiction is a six-volume anthology that covers the development of this genre from its earliest prototypes to the current day. Created originally to provide anthologies for use in classrooms in the late 1970s, these volumes became mass-market sellers. Between an ancient Roman's trip to the moon and the fantastic tales of H.G. Wells lies a journey through time and space and an awesome evolution in scientific thinking. From Gilgamesh's search for immortality to Edgar Allan Poe's balloon trip in the year 2848 these and other key works are gathered together for the first time in one anthology, complete with revealing commentary on the authors, their eras, and the role each played in establishing what we today recognize as science fiction. Volume 4 From Here to Forever covers the period from 1950-1992, illustrating how science fiction can be as concerned with language and character as much as traditional fiction and anything in the mainstream. Includes stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Matheson, C. M. Kornbluth, Jack Vance, and Pamela Zoline.


The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Author: Ken Liu

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-03-08

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1481424378

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Featured in the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his multiple award-winning stories for a groundbreaking collection—including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume. With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. This mesmerizing collection features many of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon Award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards). Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and original voices.


Finnegan's Parish & Other Stories

Finnegan's Parish & Other Stories

Author: John Dahlgren

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2006-06-01

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1411681487

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Would you create a whole new world religion for a bet? What would you do if you stumbled upon the legendary fountain of youth but found - too late! - there was an unexpected side-effect? How would you react if you went for a job interview and discovered the interviewer was a bit, well, odd? Do your next-door neighbors have a secret so mystifying and enthralling that you're willing to risk your sanity to find out what it is? Filled with larger-than-life characters, unexpected twists and side-splitting satirical humor, these stories by John Dahlgren will leave you laughing, pondering and possibly outraged . and perhaps make you think twice before you next open your bathroom door.


Daughters of Earth

Daughters of Earth

Author: Justine Larbalestier

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2006-05-22

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0819566764

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Women's contributions to science fiction have been lasting and important. This is a collection of 11 key stories, alongside 11 essays that explore the stories' contexts, meanings, and theoretical implications. Organized chronologically, it aims to create a different canon of feminist science fiction and examines the theory that addresses it.


Breaking the Sequence

Breaking the Sequence

Author: Ellen G. Friedman

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1400859948

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These nineteen essays introduce the rich and until now largely unexplored tradition of women's experimental fiction in the twentieth century. The writers discussed here range from Gertrude Stein to Christine Brooke-Rose and include, among others, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, Marguerite Young, Eva Figes, Joyce Carol Oates, and Marguerite Duras. "Friedman and Fuchs demonstrate the breadth of their research, first in their introduction to the volume, in which they outline the history of the reception of women's experimental fiction, and analyze and categorize the work not only of the writers to whom essays are devoted but of a number of others, too; and second in an extensive and wonderfully useful bibliography."--Emma Kafalenos, The International Fiction Review "After an introduction that is practically itself a monograph, eighteen essayists (too many of them distinguished to allow an equitable sampling) take up three generations of post-modernists."--American Literature "The editors see this volume as part of the continuing feminist project of the `recovery and foregrounding of women writers.' Friedman and Fuchs's substantive introduction excellently synthesizes the issues presented in the rest of the volume."--Patrick D. Murphy, Studies in the Humanities Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

Author: Istvan Csicsery-Ronay

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2012-10-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0819571520

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This major critical work from one of the preeminent voices in science fiction scholarship reframes the genre as a way of understanding today’s world. As the application of technoscience increasingly transforms every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. Though the broad scope of science fiction may vary in artistic quality and sophistication, it shares a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. A strikingly high proportion of today’s films, commercial art, popular music, video games, and non-genre fiction are what Csicsery-Ronay calls “science fictional” —stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the “seven beauties” of the title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technoscience’s development into a global regime.


The Claims of Experience

The Claims of Experience

Author: Nolan Bennett

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-08-21

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0190060700

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Why have so many figures throughout American history proclaimed their life stories when confronted by great political problems? The Claims of Experience provides a new theory for what makes autobiography political throughout the history of the United States and today. Across five chapters, Nolan Bennett examines the democratic challenges that encouraged a diverse cast of figures to bear their stories: Benjamin Franklin amid the revolutionary era, Frederick Douglass in the antebellum and abolitionist movements, Henry Adams in the Gilded Age and its anxieties of industrial change, Emma Goldman among the first Red Scare and state opposition to radical speech, and Whittaker Chambers amid the second Red Scare that initiated the anticommunist turn of modern conservatism. These historical figures made what Bennett calls a "claim of experience." By proclaiming their life stories, these authors took back authority over their experiences from prevailing political powers, and called to new community among their audiences. Their claims sought to restore to readers the power to remake and make meaning of their own lives. Whereas political theorists and activists have often seen autobiography to be too individualist or a mere documentary source of evidence, this theory reveals the democratic power that life narratives have offered those on the margins and in the mainstream. If they are successful, claims of experience summon new popular authority to surpass what their authors see as the injustices of prevailing American institutions and identity. Bennett shows through historical study and theorization how this renewed appreciation for the politics of life writing elevates these authors' distinct democratic visions while drawing common themes across them. This book offers both a method for understanding the politics of life narrative and a call to anticipate claims of experience as they appear today.