Ocean State Libraries

Gold is the final and crowning achievement of the fifty-year career of science fiction's transcendent genius, the world-famous author who defined the field of science fiction for its practitioners, its millions of readers, and the world at large. The first section contains stories that range from the humorous to the profound, at the heart of which is the title story, "Gold," a moving and revealing drama about a writer who gambles everything on a...

In Maps of the Imagination, Peter Turchi posits the idea that maps help people understand where they are in the world in the same way that literature, whether realistic or experimental, attempts to explain human realities. The author explores how writers and cartographers use many of the same devices for plotting and executing their work, making crucial decisions about what to include and what to leave out, in order to get from here to there, without...

"This is a book about the importance of fiction not alone as an aesthetic phenomenon but as a means of knowledge and discovery. The book argues that superior fiction is able to rise to levels of understanding-of worldly events, of human relationships, of human nature itself-unavailable to other disciplines or forms of learning. It goes on to argue that especially in our day, a time when so many various ideas are afloat, fiction is of the greatest...