Real Fantasies

Modern audiovisual media have spawned a 'plague of fantasies', electronically inspired phantasms that cloud the ability to reason and prevent a true understanding of a world increasingly dominated by abstractions-whether those of digital technology or the speculative market. Into this arena, enters Zizek: equipped with an agile wit and the skills of a prodigious scholar, he confidently ranges among a dazzling array of cultural references-explicating Robert Schumann as deftly as he does John Carpenter-to demonstrate how the modern condition blinds us to the ideological basis of our lives.

Ursula K. Le Guin discusses her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry?both her process and her philosophy?with all the wisdom, profundity, and rigor we expect from one of the great writers of the last century. When the New York Times referred to Ursula K. Le Guin as America’s greatest writer of science fiction, they just might have undersold her legacy. It’s hard to look at her vast body of work?novels and stories across multiple genres, poems, translations, essays, speeches, and criticism?and see anything but one of our greatest writers, period. In a series of interviews with David Naimon (Between the Covers), Le Guin discusses craft, aesthetics, and philosophy in her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction respectively. The discussions provide ample advice and guidance for writers of every level, but also give Le Guin a chance to to sound off on some of her favorite subjects: the genre wars, the patriarchy, the natural world, and what, in her opinion, makes for great writing. With excerpts from her own books and those that she looked to for inspiration, this volume is a treat for Le Guin’s longtime readers, a perfect introduction for those first approaching her writing, and a tribute to her incredible life and work.

Picks up on divisions within the area of analytical psychology and explores many of the most hotly contested issues, with a group of leading international Jungian authors contributing papers from contrasting perspectives.

Forever Shores brings together the best Australian authors of fantasy fiction writing today. From Isobelle Carmody's tragic romantic style to Terry Dowling's complex and technical worlds, and Carmel Bird's intriguing 'genetic unconscious deciding factor' all the stories in this collection share the same fascination with the fantastic.

As Alan Klima writes in Ethnography #9, “there are other possible starting places than the earnest realism of anthropological discourse as a method of critical thought.” In this experimental ethnography of capitalism, ghosts, and numbers in mid- and late-twentieth-century Thailand, Klima uses this provocation to deconstruct naive faith in the “real” and in the material in academic discourse that does not recognize that it is, itself, writing. Klima also twists the common narrative that increasing financial abstractions in economic culture are a kind of real horror story, entangling it with other modes of abstraction commonly seen as less “real,” such as spirit consultations, ghost stories, and haunted gambling. His unconventional, distinctive, and literary form of storytelling uses multiple voices, from ethnographic modes to a first-person narrative in which he channels Northern Thai ghostly tales and the story of a young Thai spirit. This genre alchemy creates strange yet compelling new relations between being and not being, presence and absence, fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and reality. In embracing the speculative as a writing form, Klima summons unorthodox possibilities for truth in contemporary anthropology.

She was his living fantasy… Dr. Matthew Jarvis advertised for a trainee doctor, preferably female, for his small rural clinic. To his total shock, one of the applicants was Dr. Linsey Wheeler, the girl he had rescued from drowning eight years ago. Even then she had had an impact on him, but the present reality was a far cry from the fantasy he had cherished—it was considerably better! She had never forgotten him—but Matthew didn't consider himself anything special, until Linsey set out to prove him wrong!