Many influential conspiracy theories originated in Eastern Europe. This volume analyzes the history behind this widespread phenomenon as well as its relationship with representations of the present in Eastern European cultures and literatures.

This book presents readers and creative writing enthusiasts with comprehensive coverage of the elements of fiction and real-world writing techniques that help build skills--such as sensory detailing, character construction, and cause and effect plotting. Plenty of practical advice completes this treatment of the fiction genre. Chapter topics include character, plot, story structure, dialogue, point of view, style, and details. For writers pursuing a hobby or a dream--or just dabbling, this insightful guide will teach them how do it and "say" it better.

"These often unexpected texts offer a provocative invitation to the hermeneutical challenges of the ever changing shape of the literature and theology canon. Students will be surprised and delighted by these carefully selected and powerful readings."---George Newlands, Professor Emeritus of Divinity, University of Glasgow --

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a shy twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness when she meets Ernest Hemingway and is captivated by his energy, intensity and burning ambition to write. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for France. But glamorous Jazz Age Paris, full of artists and writers, fuelled by alcohol and gossip, is no place for family life and fidelity. Ernest and Hadley's marriage begins to founder, and the birth of a beloved son serves only to drive them further apart. Then, at last, Ernest's ferocious literary endeavours begin to bring him recognition - not least from a woman intent on making him her own . . .

How could he be a good boy and a bad boy at the same time? The TRUTH is what is. FICTION is not reality—but it can help us to see the TRUTH through stories, e.g., The Boy Who Cried Wolf. LIES deceive, for evil purposes, and for good purposes. But what happens when what we think is the TRUTH turns out to be a LIE? In his ninth decade, the author, who has spent his life creating FICTION to examine TRUTH, decided to write the story of his life, truthfully. But, in the process of examining his life—his prayers, works, joys and sufferings—he discovers it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the TRUTH from the LIES. And the chief insights into the reality of a life he thought noble, his FICTION—often in the form of dreams—reveals his true nature as a failure in his professed faith—until a good woman shows him the way out of his dark forest.

This monograph examines truth in fiction by applying the techniques of a naturalized logic of human cognitive practices. The author structures his project around two focal questions. What would it take to write a book about truth in literary discourse with reasonable promise of getting it right? What would it take to write a book about truth in fiction as true to the facts of lived literary experience as objectivity allows? It is argued that the most semantically distinctive feature of the sentences of fiction is that they areunambiguously true and false together. It is true that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street and also concurrently false that he did. A second distinctive feature of fiction is that the reader at large knows of this inconsistency and isn’t in the least cognitively molested by it. Why, it is asked, would this be so? What would explain it? Two answers are developed. According to the no-contradiction thesis, the semantically tangled sentences of fiction are indeed logically inconsistent but not logically contradictory. According to the no-bother thesis, if the inconsistencies of fiction were contradictory, a properly contrived logic for the rational management of inconsistency would explain why readers at large are not thrown off cognitive stride by their embrace of those contradictions. As developed here, the account of fiction suggests the presence of an underlying three - or four-valued dialethic logic. The author shows this to be a mistaken impression. There are only two truth-values in his logic of fiction. The naturalized logic of Truth in Fiction jettisons some of the standard assumptions and analytical tools of contemporary philosophy, chiefly because the neurotypical linguistic and cognitive behaviour of humanity at large is at variance with them. Using the resources of a causal response epistemology in tandem with the naturalized logic, the theory produced here is data-driven, empirically sensitive, and open to a circumspect collaboration with the empirical sciences of language and cognition.

A brilliant story of the secrets we keep. Desmond Fitzmaurice is a mysterious literary giant of the thirties whom no one has seen for years. Caroline is a London journalist, and hasn't the faintest interest in going to Dublin to interview him. That his life story will feature 'lots of sex and some violence', as the old man claims, seems farcical. She'll stay for a couple of nights, extract what she can and try to make his life sound interesting. But in Desmond's quiet house, his quiet life, Caroline discovers much, much more than she bargained for...

Twelve stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, nine of them never before published in English. Of these twelve short stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, only three have previously appeared in English, making this the first "new" book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as any reader could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial intelligences or artificial life forms, long a Lem preoccupation; some feature quite insane theories of cosmology or evolution. All are thought provoking and scathingly funny. Written from 1956 to 1993, the stories are arranged in chronological order. In the title story, "The Truth," a scientist in an insane asylum theorizes that the sun is alive; "The Journal" appears to be an account by an omnipotent being describing the creation of infinite universes--until, in a classic Lem twist, it turns out to be no such thing; in "An Enigma," beings debate whether offspring can be created without advanced degrees and design templates. Other stories feature a computer that can predict the future by 137 seconds, matter-destroying spores, a hunt in which the prey is a robot, and an electronic brain eager to go on the lam. These stories are peak Lem, exploring ideas and themes that resonate throughout his writing.

This collection of Bertrand Russell's essays is available in paperback for the first time since its publication in 1961. Its first section deals with the books which influenced Russell in his youth. The works of Shelley, Turgenev, Ibsen and Gibbon are among those selected for discussion. The second part is devoted to essays on politics and education. The third section is one of divertissements and parables, which also includes some rare descriptions of Russell's dreams. Finally there are 11 essays and speeches concerned with peace and war, which include some of Russell's most famous pronouncements on nuclear warfare and international tension. Fact and Fiction provides an insight into one of this century's greatest philosophers' range of interests and depth of convictions.