There is a high level of techno-optimism in the project even the stories explore situations involving misinformation, isolation mitigated only by technology-mediated interactions, unemployment, surveillance, and terrorism. I like that the panelists reflect a range of different backgrounds, perspectives, and areas of expertise, meaning that we will explore the intersection of artificial intelligence and religion in diverse ways. Many of them have religious themes to them and so it is natural for this book to be explored at AAR. I do not yet know how we are going to divvy up the stories among us. Speculative fiction and speculative nonfiction working hand in hand. The concept is one that immediately grabbed me: a book co-authored by a sci-fi author and a scientist, a collection of short stories and essays, the former depicting scenarios that the latter discusses. One of my appearances on the program of the American Academy of Religion conference in Denver in November is on a panel discussing the book AI 2041.
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The confusion of bodily change provides a murky backdrop for the lucid mental clarity this period of life can bring. Her latest novel, The Lying Li fe of Adults, is set over the protracted years of adolescence, from 12 to 17. Her characters startle themselves with their readiness to betray their friends for the newly discovered opposite sex, but they startle themselves too when they jettison their heavy, often rather insulting male suitors and return to their nimbler companions. She is good, also, on the way that childhood friendships change, becoming infused with desire and longing. E lena Ferrante is so good on the bodily feelings of female adolescence: the sweaty, clotted skin, the sudden bulges as breasts form, the awkwardly exciting transformations. When Sophronia and Gabriel meet, she is hesitant to let her guard down after an abusive marriage but he is smitten. So he has taken a job as a minister in Pale Harbor, even though he knows little about the philosophy and is ill prepared to guide others. Gabriel Stone's wife was deep into transcendentalism before her death and Gabriel feels obligated to become the man she wanted him to be. But someone is dropping strange clues and threats on her doorstep, clues that only a person who knows literature can unravel. When bodies begin turning up, Sophy is blamed. The townfolk of Pale Harbor think she's a witch and a murderer so she's exiled herself with only two servants and a part-time helper in her sprawling Maine home, Castle Carver. Sophronia Carver was widowed 4 years ago. Caroline introduces Sam to Poet's Corner, a hidden room and a tight-knit group of misfits who have been ignored by the school at large. So when Sam meets Caroline, she has to keep her new friend with a refreshing sense of humor and no style a secret, right up there with Sam's weekly visits to her psychiatrist. Yet Sam knows she'd be truly crazy to leave the protection of the most popular girls in school. Second-guessing every move, thought, and word makes daily life a struggle, and it doesn't help that her lifelong friends will turn toxic at the first sign of a wrong outfit, wrong lunch, or wrong crush. But hidden beneath the straightened hair and expertly applied makeup is a secret that her friends would never understand: Sam has Purely-Obsessional OCD and is consumed by a stream of dark thoughts and worries that she can't turn off. Samantha McAllister looks just like the rest of the popular girls in her junior class. Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone Book PDF SummaryĪ New York Times Best Seller If you could read my mind, you wouldn't be smiling. Selected Non-Fictions demonstrates just how quickly Borges began wrestling with such brainteasers as identity, time, and infinity. So much for our image of the mandarin bookworm! The very engagé author of this book seems more like a subequatorial Camus, with a dash of Siskel and Ebert on the side. Eliot Weinberger has assembled just a fraction of this outpouring in Selected Non-Fictions, and the result is a 559-page Borgesian blowout, in which the Argentinean fabulist takes on being and nothingness, James Joyce and Lana Turner, and (surprisingly) racial hatred and the rise of Nazism. And his nonfiction output was even more staggering: the young Borges cranked out hundreds of essays, book notes, cultural polemics, and movie reviews, and even after he lost his sight in 1955, he continued to dictate short pieces by the dozens. His collected stories alone run to nearly 1,000 pages. In fact, he was something of a verbal spendthrift. Yet his splendid economy, along the wafer-thin proportions of such classic volumes as Ficciones and Labyrinths, has given readers the impression that Borges was miserly with his prose. Jorge Luis Borges was our century's greatest miniaturist, perpetually cramming entire universes onto the head of a pin. While the novel has traditionally been seen as tracking the development of the nation state, the author of this book queries whether globalisation might currently be prompting the emergence of a new sub-genre of the novel that is adept at imagining global community. Consequently, Cloud Atlas creates a constantly shifting world where the only fixed entity is the subject and its comet-shaped birthmark. The novel’s structure goes into thematic depths and creates a bridge, a constant interplay between form and content, captured in the metaphor of the concertina. It is exactly the work’s heterogeneity, its jumps through time and space, its interrupted chapter structure that lend it a special unity and coherence that erases both geographical and temporal borders. Seemingly in a paradoxical way, the multiple liminal states identifiable in the novel convey the ultimate sense of borderlessness. The novel operates a constant state of liminality, a state that will be embodied by the subject. Numerous versions of past, present, and future run in parallel, the actual and the virtual coexist, and the text folds upon itself. In this fictional world, the subject will serve as an entity that brings together disparate spatialities and temporalities through an intricate symbolic web that connects the subject’s body to the world it inhabits. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) presents its readers with a “borderless world.” This borderlessness concerns space and time, with complex and interweaving spatiotemporal planes. She should know better than to sleep with someone she knows, but she can't seem to resist him. Mortified and desperate to escape the post-wedding drama, Amalie decides to go on her honeymoon alone, only to find the man who rejected her also heading to the same tiny island for work. But he's not interested in becoming her revenge screw. She has every reason to freak out, and in a moment of insanity, she throws herself at the first hot-blooded male she sees. Instead of proclaiming his undying love, her husband can be heard, by Amalie and their guests, getting off with someone else. Amalie Whitfield is the picture of a blushing bride during her wedding reception-but for all the wrong reasons. Filled with hilariously scandalous situations and enough sexual chemistry to power an airplane from New York City to the South Pacific, Hooking Up is the next standalone, laugh-out-loud romantic comedy from Helena Hunting, the New York Times bestselling author of the Pucked series and Shacking Up. Lauren has been praised for writing delectable heroes and strong-willed heroines to match. The series centers on a group of friends following graduation from college. The first novel of the series, Sweet Filthy Boy, earned the Romantic Times Book of the Year award for 2014. The second series by the authors debuted in 2014. The rights later reverted to the authors. In 2013, Beautiful Bastard was optioned by Constantin Film for a film adaptation. Together, they present workshops and have been speakers at events such as RT Booklovers Convention, Book Expo of America (BEA), and Romance Writers of America (RWA), and are frequent guests at San Diego Comic-Con International. Īuthor of eighteen New York Times Bestselling novels, their work is currently translated in over 30 languages. In 2017, Holly Root founded Root Literary. The pair met in 2009 while writing fanfiction online, and, in 2010, became co-authors, signing agent Holly Root from the Waxman-Leavell Literary Agency in 2011. Beautiful Bastard series, Wild Seasons seriesĬhristina Lauren (the combined pen name of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings) is an American author duo of contemporary fiction, teen fiction and romance novels. In an era of endless possibility, he finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession with beauty-a prize as compelling to him as power and riches to his friends. It is the summer of 1983, and twenty-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions, who becomes both a friend to Nick and his uneasy responsibility.Īs the boom years of the mid-eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world-its grand parties, its surprising alliances, its parade of monsters both comic and menacing. The scowling asocial Cromwell is an invention of posterity, over-influenced by Holbein’s dour portrait. Writing in the Guardian, she reminds us that Thomas Cromwell was part of this world too: Hilary Mantel catches a lot of this passion and swagger in Wolf Hall. Satirists condemned the aristocracy and burghers for wearing too much bling: flaunting their status in chains of gold so heavy you were amazed they could walk at all. Foreign ambassadors were surprised by Englishmen’s capacity to weep openly and publicly at the slightest provocation. Equally, to imagine the interiors of English churches in the 1520s, think Andalusian gaudy rather than Hawksmoor’s classicist austerity, the walls covered in brightly painted scenes, the chapels filled with statuary and icons.Įarly Tudor London was a bright, brash and bustling place, unlike its whitewashed Protestant successor, and its inhabitants behaved in similarly extravagant fashion. Cheapside would have been a bustling surge of traders and customers, alive with noise and smells, packed with barrels and panniers of fish, fruit and spices, more like a bazaar than the modern city. In his biography of Sir Thomas More, Peter Ackroyd audaciously asks us to imagine pre-Reformation London as the street markets of Marrakesh. |