Rather than write briefly about each of the many documentary films Wiseman has made over the past 20 years, Benson (rhetoric and communication arts and sciences, Pennsylvania State U.) and Anderson (communication, U. of Massachusetts-Amherst) choose a few representative examples. They interpret the films, look at the rhetorical structures, and explore the people and processes. The first edition was published in 1989. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
From the author of Welcome to Camp America, an eerie exploration of America's performance of power and identity in the post-9/11 era What are the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play, to manage unsettling realities? Made on ten military bases across the United States since 2016, Necessary Fictionsdocuments mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of "Atropia" and its denizens, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios. Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the US military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in "moulage"--fake wounds--as they prepare to deploy. Brooklyn-based conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights lawyer Debi Cornwall (born 1973) photographs this meta-reality--the artifice of war--presented in the book with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America's fantasy industrial complex. The book includes an essay by PEN Award-winning critical theorist Sarah Sentilles.
What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.
Jaded New York City Public Defender Liana Cohen would give anything to have one client in whom she can believe. Dozens of hardened criminals and repeat offenders have chipped away at her faith in both herself and the system. Her boyfriend Jakob’s high-powered law firm colleagues see her do-gooder job as a joke, which only adds to the increasing strain in their relationship. Enter imprisoned felon Danny Shea, whose unforgivable crime would raise a moral conflict in an attorney at the height of her idealism—and that hasn't been Liana in quite a while. But Danny's astonishing blend of good looks, intelligence, and vulnerability intrigues Liana. Could he be the client she’s been longing for—the wrongly accused in need of a second chance? Is he innocent? As their attorney-client relationship transforms into something less than arm’s length, Liana is forced to confront fundamental questions of truth, faith, and love—and to decide who she wants to be.
Cloud isn’t just a place to work. It’s a place to live. And when you’re here, you’ll never want to leave. “A thrilling story of corporate espionage at the highest level . . . and a powerful cautionary tale about technology, runaway capitalism, and the nightmare world we are making for ourselves.”—Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter Film rights sold to Imagine Entertainment for director Ron Howard! • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Financial Times • Real Simple • Kirkus Reviews Paxton never thought he’d be working for Cloud, the giant tech company that’s eaten much of the American economy. Much less that he’d be moving into one of the company’s sprawling live-work facilities. But compared to what’s left outside, Cloud’s bland chainstore life of gleaming entertainment halls, open-plan offices, and vast warehouses…well, it doesn’t seem so bad. It’s more than anyone else is offering. Zinnia never thought she’d be infiltrating Cloud. But now she’s undercover, inside the walls, risking it all to ferret out the company’s darkest secrets. And Paxton, with his ordinary little hopes and fears? He just might make the perfect pawn. If she can bear to sacrifice him. As the truth about Cloud unfolds, Zinnia must gamble everything on a desperate scheme—one that risks both their lives, even as it forces Paxton to question everything about the world he’s so carefully assembled here. Together, they’ll learn just how far the company will go…to make the world a better place. Set in the confines of a corporate panopticon that’s at once brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real, The Warehouse is a near-future thriller about what happens when Big Brother meets Big Business--and who will pay the ultimate price. Praise for The Warehouse “A fun, fast-paced read [that] walks a fine line between a near-future thriller and a smart satire . . . makes you wonder if we’re already too far into a disastrous future, or if there’s still some hope for humanity.”—NPR “I loved The Warehouse, although and because it made my blood run cold. This is what our world could be by this time next year.”—S.J. Rozan, Edgar award-winning author of Paper Son “An inventive, addictive, Crichton-esque, page-turning, near-future dystopian thriller.”—Paul Tremblay, Stoker award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghostsof Lock Every Door
In this outstanding book Susan Strehle argues that a new fiction has developed from the influence of modern physics. She calls this new fiction actualism, and within that framework she offers a critical analysis of major novels by Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, John Barth, Margaret Atwood, and Donald Barthelme. According to Strehle, the actualists balance attention to questions of art with an engaged meditation on the external, actual world. While these actualist novels diverge markedly from realistic practice, Strehle claims that they do so in order to reflect more acutely what we now understand as real. Reality is no longer "realistic"; in the new physical or quantum universe, reality is discontinuous, energetic, relative, statistical, subjectively seen, and uncertainly known -- all terms taken from new physics. Actualist fiction is characterized by incompletions, indeterminacy, and "open" endings unsatisfying to the readerly wish for fulfilled promises and completed patterns. Gravity's Rainbow, for example, ends not with a period but with a dash. Strehle argues that such innovations in narrative reflect on twentieth-century history, politics, science, and discourse.
'A gem' - The Evening Standard 'Pure book joy. Deep thinking made digestible & doled up with lashings of wit' Bernardine Evaristo on Twitter 'So smart and interesting!' Fearne Cotton on Instagram ____________________________________________________________________________ Ever wanted to know what really happens in a therapist's consultation room? Bestselling author Philippa Perry (The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read) turns her keen insights to the power of therapy. This compelling study of psychotherapy in the form of a graphic novel vividly explores a year's therapy sessions as a search for understanding and truth. Beautifully illustrated by Flo Perry, author of How to Have Feminist Sex, and accompanied by succinct and illuminating footnotes, this book offers a witty and thought-provoking exploration of the therapeutic journey, considering a range of skills, insights and techniques along the way. ______________________________________________________________________________ 'I loved it. I smiled and laughed. And nodded. One to read' Susie Orbach, author of In Therapy '(Full of) wit and good sense (...) Philippa is a tonic' Rachel Cooke, Observer
Nobody knew why, but when the boys and girls reached a certain age the parents locked themselves up in their houses, and the teenagers ran wild... Lumen Fowler knows she is different. While the rest of her peers are falling beneath the sway of her community’s darkest rite of passage, she resists. For Lumen has a secret. Her mother never ‘breached’ and she knows she won’t either. But as she investigates her town’s strange traditions and unearths stories from her family’s past, she soon realises she may not know herself – or her wild side – at all...
Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis argues that the popularity of the term "climate fiction" has paradoxically exhausted the term’s descriptive power and that it has developed into a black box containing all kinds of fictions which depict climatic events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse as well as our apparent inability to avert it, we face geophysical changes of drastic proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the consequences. This book argues that this crisis of imagination can be partly relieved by climate fiction, which may help us comprehend the potential impact of the crisis we are facing. Strictly assigning "climate fiction" to fictions that incorporate the climatological paradigm of anthropogenic global warming into their plots, this book sets out to salvage the term’s speculative quality. It argues that climate fiction should be regarded as no less than a vital supplement to climate science, because climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence within worlds not only deemed likely by science, but which are scientifically anticipated. Focusing primarily on English and German language fictions, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis shows how Western climate fiction sketches various affective and cognitive relations to the world in its utilization of a small number of recurring imaginaries, or imagination forms. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies more generally.
Philosophers have struggled to explain how literary fiction can be such an important source of insight into the human condition. John Gibson offers a novel and intriguing account of the relationship between literature and everyday life, and shows how literature can give us an understanding of our world without literally being about our world.
