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...

Fifteen fiction stories, 18 non-fiction and 20 essays on the craft of writing science fiction. One of the fiction pieces is Cal, on a robot who wants to be a writer. His owner, a writer, agrees to program him for the task, but when the robot outdoes the writer in his craft, switches him off.

"Examines the new emphasis on text-dependent questions, rigor, and text complexity, and what it means to be literate in the 21st century"--Page 4 of cover.

Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort. Gornick, who emerged as a major writer...