From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science fiction,” a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer. This book brings together her three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010: "Flying Rabbits," which begins with Atwood's early rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; "Burning Bushes," which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and "Dire Cartographies," which investigates Utopias and Dystopias. In Other Worlds also includes some of Atwood's key reviews and thoughts about the form. Among those writers discussed are Marge Piercy, Rider Haggard, Ursula Le Guin, Ishiguro, Bryher, Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. She elucidates the differences (as she sees them) between "science fiction" proper, and "speculative fiction," as well as between "sword and sorcery/fantasy" and "slipstream fiction." For all readers who have loved The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood, In Other Worlds is a must. Note: The electronic version of this title contains over thirty additional, illuminating eBook-exclusive illustrations by the author.

In this classic work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading and most influential cultural theorists working today, analyzes the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts. Developing an original integration of powerful contemporary methodologies – deconstruction, Marxism and feminism – Spivak turns this new model on major debates in the study of literature and culture, thus ensuring that In Other Worlds has become a valuable tool for studying our own and other worlds of culture.

Stories about the occult, folk religions, superstition, and spiritual customs in Russia by one of the most essential twentieth-century writers of short fiction and essays. Though best known for her comic and satirical sketches of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Teffi was a writer of great range and human sympathy. The stories on otherworldly themes in this collection are some of her finest and most profound, displaying the acute psychological sensitivity beneath her characteristic wit and surface brilliance. Other Worlds presents stories from across the whole of Teffi’s long career, from her early days as a literary celebrity in Moscow to her post-Revolutionary years as an émigré in Paris. In the early story “A Quiet Backwater,” a laundress gives a long disquisition on the name days of the flora and fauna and on the Feast of the Holy Ghost, a day on which “no one dairnst disturb the earth.” The story “Wild Evening” is about the fear of the unknown; “The Kind That Walk,” a penetrating study of antisemitism and of xenophobia; and “Baba Yaga,” about the archetypal Russian witch and her longing for wildness and freedom. Teffi traces the persistent influence of the ancient Slavic gods in superstitions and customs, and the deep connection of the supernatural to everyday life in the provinces. In “Volya,” the autobiographical final story, the power and pain of Baba Yaga is Teffi’s own.

Christopher White points to ways that both spiritual practices and scientific speculation about multiverses and invisible dimensions are efforts to peer into the hidden elements and even existential meaning of the universe. Creatively appropriated, these ideas can restore a spiritual sense that the world is greater than anything our eyes can see.

Reproduction of the original: A Journey in Other Worlds by John Jacob Astor

In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of The Handmaid’s Tale: Margaret Atwood describes how she came to write her utopian, dystopian works. The word “utopia” comes from Thomas More’s book of the same name—meaning “no place” or “good place,” or both. In “Dire Cartographies,” from the essay collection In Other Worlds, Atwood coins the term “ustopia,” which combines utopia and dystopia, the imagined perfect society and its opposite. Each contains latent versions of the other. Following her intellectual journey and growing familiarity with ustopias fictional and real, from Atlantis to Avatar and Beowulf to Berlin in 1984 (and 1984), Atwood explains how years after abandoning a PhD thesis with chapters on good and bad societies, she produced novel-length dystopias and ustopias of her own. “My rules for The Handmaid’s Tale were simple,” Atwood writes. “I would not put into this book anything that humankind had not already done, somewhere, sometime, or for which it did not already have the tools.” With great wit and erudition, Atwood reveals the history behind her beloved creations.

Three dazzling stories of magic, fantasy, and romance from the #1 New York Times bestselling author—together in one volume for the first time. Dragonswan Only one man can decipher the symbolism of Channon’s legendary Dragon Tapestry: Sebastian, a battle-scarred shapeshifting dragon trapped between two worlds. And Channon has no choice but to follow him into a realm of magic, danger, and adventure. Fire and Ice By running from her past, Livia meets her future—Adron, an ex-assassin brutally scarred by a mission gone wrong. And only Livia has the courage to heal his emotional scars and change both their lives forever. Knightly Dreams Betrayed by her boyfriend, Taryn no longer believes in being swept away—until an unlikely hero literally steps out of her paperback novel and into her heart. Is her mind playing beautiful tricks? Or has her fantasy become a reality?