Can the novel survive in an age when tales of historical figures and contemporary personalities dominate the reading lists of the book-buying public? Naomi Jacobs addresses this question in a study of writers such as William Styron, E. L. Doctorow, and Robert Coover, who challenge the dominance of nonfiction by populating their fictions with real people, living and dead. Jacobs explores the genesis, varieties, and implications of this trend in a prose as lively as that of the writers she critiques. Using as a case study Robert Coover’s portrait of Richard Nixon in The Public Burning, Jacobs addresses the important legal and ethical questions raised by this trend and applies contemporary libel law to the fictionalization of living people, such as Richard Nixon. She closes her study by speculating on the future of this device and of the novel.

In this remarkable tetralogy of short novels, Nichols envisions the nature of our communal, yet highly individualized society in which decentralized democracy, ecological sensibility, bioregional principles, and liberatory technologies are integrated into a traditional culture. It is a vision of utopia emerging out of the rich particularity of history and lived experience. First published in five separate volumes in the late 1970s, Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai has never gained the recognition it deserves. It is an extraordinary contribution to both literary and theoretical utopianism and should be recognized both for its radical ideology and for the fecundity of the imagination that informs it at all moments. It is a beguiling and inventive mixture of hallucinogenic prose and poetry that has demonstrates a fiercely independent mind and talent at its pinnacle. This reissue includes the full series, Red Shift (with illustrations from Peter Schumann), Arrival, Gahr City, The Harditts in Sawna, and Exile. "As those lucky enough to have read Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai know, Robert Nichols is one of our most profoundly original writers, his political passion, and acuteness transfigured by a visionary gleam." --Ursula K. Le Guin

Writing about a wide variety of subjects and in a multitude of styles, the twenty writers collected here share a mastery of language and an extraordinary ability to entertain. Ellen Akins from World Like a Knife, Her BookSteve Barthelme from And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, ZorroGlenn Blake from Drowned Moon, MarshJennifer Finney Boylan from Remind Me to Murder You Later, Thirty-six Miracles of Lyndon JohnsonRichard Burgin from Fear of Blue Skies, BodysurfingAvery Chenoweth from Wingtips, PowermanGuy Davenport from Da Vinci's Bicycle, A Field of Snow on a Slope of the RosenbergTristan Davies from Cake, CounterfactualsStephen Dixon from Time to Go, Time to GoJudith Grossman from How Aliens Think, RoveraJosephine Jacobsen from What Goes without Saying, On the IslandGreg Johnson from I Am Dangerous, Hemingway's CatsJerry Klinkowitz from Basepaths, BasepathsMichael Martone from Safety Patrol, Safety PatrolJack Matthews from Crazy Women, Haunted by Name Our Ignorant LipsJean McGarry from Dream Date, The Last TimeRobert Nichols from In the Air, Six Ways of Looking at FarmingJoe Ashby Porter from Lithuania, West BaltimoreFrances Sherwood from Everything You've Heard Is True, HistoryRobley Wilson from The Book of Lost Fathers, Hard Times

With Exile, Robert Nichols concludes his innovative utopian tetralogy, Daily lives in Nghsi-Altai. Thus far, we have peered at this imaginary central Asian land through the eyes of exploring Westerners and the inhabitants themselves, learning the ways of both city dwellers and country folk.

The essays gathered here recommend the work of Ernest Bloch as a challenge to older models of historical materialism and utopian emancipation and give specific examples of how Bloch's work can contribute to current debates about utopia, nationalism, collective memory, and the complex relationship between ideology and everyday life.

Five hundred years since its first publication, Thomas More's Utopia remains astonishingly radical and provocative. More imagines an island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and property is communal. In a text hovering between fantasy, satire, blueprint and game, More explores the theories and realities behind war, political conflicts, social tensions and redistribution, and imagines the day-to-day lives of a citizenry living free from fear, oppression, violence and suffering. But there has always been a shadow at the heart of Utopia. If this is a depiction of the perfect state, why, as well as wonder, does it provoke a growing unease? In this quincentenary edition, published in conjunction with Somerset House, More's text is introduced by multi-award-winning author China Miville and accompanied by four essays from Ursula K. Le Guin, today's most distinguished utopian writer and thinker.

The third volume of Robert Nichols’s utopian tetralogy, Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai. In the previous books (Arrival and Garh City), we were treated to tantalizing glimpses of the imaginary central Asian country of Nghsi-Altai seen through the eyes of three travelers from the West, followed by an investigation of the city in a technologically advanced society which yet maintains an elaborate, "primitive" kinship system. We now turn to six narratives of village life, focusing on members of the Harditt family. Maddi, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl; Dhillon, a farm apprentice; his married older brother, Srikant -- these are the Harditt children of earlier volumes. "Women in Middle Age" tells of Sathan, their mother, and Nanda, their aunt, and the workings of the matriarchy in Sawna. An account is then given of the death of the grandfather, Old Harditt, and his translation into the family’s Ancestor Society. And finally, we see Venu, Sathan’s husband, as an elected official of the Wind Brotherhood of solar engineers. These are not, however, tales of individuals in the usual sense but probes in the web of relationships that constitutes a communal society, the widening circle of clan, tribe, and phratry. Each story, moreover, reveals an aspect of a delicate political-industrial balance -- for the world of Nghsi-Altai is modern, indeed a paradigm of an alternate society.

Science fiction is a literary genre based on scientific speculation. Works of science fiction use the ideas and the vocabulary of all sciences to create valid narratives that explore the future effects of science on events and human beings. Science Fact and Science Fiction examines in one volume how science has propelled science-fiction and, to a lesser extent, how science fiction has influenced the sciences. Although coverage will discuss the science behind the fiction from the Classical Age to the present, focus is naturally on the 19th century to the present, when the Industrial Revolution and spectacular progress in science and technology triggered an influx of science-fiction works speculating on the future. As scientific developments alter expectations for the future, the literature absorbs, uses, and adapts such contextual visions. The goal of the Encyclopedia is not to present a catalog of sciences and their application in literary fiction, but rather to study the ongoing flow and counterflow of influences, including how fictional representations of science affect how we view its practice and disciplines. Although the main focus is on literature, other forms of science fiction, including film and video games, are explored and, because science is an international matter, works from non-English speaking countries are discussed as needed.