How To Make Believe

Derrick Jensen takes no prisoners in The Culture of Make Believe, his brilliant and eagerly awaited follow-up to his powerful and lyrical A Language Older Than Words. What begins as an exploration of the lines of thought and experience that run between the massive lynchings in early twentieth-century America to today's death squads in South America soon explodes into an examination of the very heart of our civilization. The Culture of Make Believe is a book that is as impeccably researched as it is moving, with conclusions as far-reaching as they are shocking.

In The Case for Make Believe, Harvard child psychologist Susan Linn tells the alarming story of childhood under siege in a commercialized and technology-saturated world. Although play is essential to human development and children are born with an innate capacity for make believe, Linn argues that, in modern-day America, nurturing creative play is not only countercultural—it threatens corporate profits. A book with immediate relevance for parents and educators alike, The Case for Make Believe helps readers understand how crucial child’s play is—and what parents and educators can do to protect it. At the heart of the book are stories of children at home, in school, and at a therapist’s office playing about real-life issues from entering kindergarten to a sibling’s death, expressing feelings they can’t express directly, and making meaning of an often confusing world. In an era when toys come from television and media companies sell videos as brain-builders for babies, Linn lays out the inextricable links between play, creativity, and health, showing us how and why to preserve the space for make believe that children need to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives.

A stalker, a journalist and a librarian converge in small-town Saskatchewan in this brilliantly quirky and entertaining novel of love, obsession and the pursuit of fame. Broken Head has only one famous resident, and Joan Swift, the local librarian, is about to find out all about him. Darwin Andrew Goodwin hails from nearby Venus, Alberta, and is renowned for stalking Stephanie Rush, a Canadian-born starlet who lives in L.A. with her movie director husband. We learn all about Goodwin's obsession from Joan, and when Joan begins her own sultry affair with Jason Warwick, a new arrival from Toronto who is a reporter for the local newspaper, The Standard, the stage is set for a story filled with surprises. To spice up small-town life even more, Joan, who bears a striking resemblance to Stephanie Rush, agrees to impersonate the starlet as part of Jason's plan to write a book. Their hope is to entice Goodwin into telling his side of the story to the look-alike. And when Goodwin is charged and Joan shows up in court dressed as Stephanie, the town starts to buzz with rumour and speculation, and Goodwin's own extraordinary tale of love is told.

A major question in studies of aesthetic expression is how we can understand and explain similarities and differences among different forms of representation. In the current volume, this question is addressed through the lens of make-believe theory, a philosophical theory broadly introduced by two seminal works - Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe and Gregory Currie's The Nature of Fiction, both published 1990. Since then, make-believe theory has become central in the philosphical discussion of representation. As a first of its kind, the current volume comprises 17 detailed studies of highly different forms of representation, such as novels, plays, TV-series, role games, computer games, lamentation poetry and memoirs. The collection contributes to establishing make-believe theory as a powerful theoretical tool for a wide array of studies traditionally falling under the humanities umbrella.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that adage is put to its test in Molly Make-Believe, a charming romance novel from Eleanor Hallowell Abbott. When up-and-coming businessman Carl Stanton falls ill and is prescribed weeks of bed rest, his fiancee Cornelia decides to go ahead with her plans to visit relatives in the South. A flurry of love letters follow -- but their true provenance leads the ailing Carl down an unexpected path.

Presents over 125 activities and projects for creative fun with young children, including storybook play, cooking, costumes and masks, puppets, fingerpaints, games, and mini-plays.

Looks at the Turkish territory of Northern Cyprus, a self-defined state, which is actually imaginary (because it is only recognized by Turkey). This title examines the sense of haunted property and objects lost and gained in the partition, along with people's relation to the fictive remapping of places and history by this new state.