Is it possible to find Utopia; that imaginary place of perfect peace and understanding? Every once in a while, amidst the turmoil of life, a glimpse of this perfection will come, perhaps in seeing a sunrise or a sunset, or hearing a babbling brook, or looking into the wonder filled eyes of a child. Always, it can be found, when sought. As a child, I felt that I was different from others, as if everyone else had a secret that I was not in on. I began to be a seeker at a very young age. I married my high school sweetheart, and recall the blessing being bestowed upon us during our wedding, “that we may find the peace that passes all understanding.” At that same time, in the background, the song “Oh Perfect Love” was being sung. I admit to being somewhat idealistic, but oh, how I yearned for just a glance at that kind of peace and love. In no way did it come in the way that I ever would have imagined. Just 14 years, and four children after the marriage, my husband died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving me devastated with feelings of total inadequacy to run a family business left in my keeping, and raise four young children. Along with all the responsibility that came with these roles, I came to the realization that often times I would need to create a reality with the tools that I was able to gather along the way, constantly finding them in need of repair or replenishing. It was during this time that I began to see writing as one of those tools and sought peace through poems I would write. Whenever I would reach a milestone in life, or be richly inspired by a happening, or experience the death of a loved one, I would write a poem and find a resolve as a way of ending the poem; always seeking a positive place to leave my feelings. “Reaching Utopia” is a poetry book about some of the joys and sorrows I have known along the way. Because I have always been a seeker of that perfect peace, I am happy for the joys of the journey, and grateful for the sorrows. And as I have become a believer, I hope, you may also come to believe that Utopia, although an ideal created from imagination, can be a place within your reach.

Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.

Dystopia: A Natural History is the first monograph devoted to the concept of dystopia. Taking the term to encompass both a literary tradition of satirical works, mostly on totalitarianism, as well as real despotisms and societies in a state of disastrous collapse, this volume redefines the central concepts and the chronology of the genre and offers a paradigm-shifting understanding of the subject. Part One assesses the theory and prehistory of 'dystopia'. By contrast to utopia, conceived as promoting an ideal of friendship defined as 'enhanced sociability', dystopia is defined by estrangement, fear, and the proliferation of 'enemy' categories. A 'natural history' of dystopia thus concentrates upon the centrality of the passion or emotion of fear and hatred in modern despotisms. The work of Le Bon, Freud, and others is used to show how dystopian groups use such emotions. Utopia and dystopia are portrayed not as opposites, but as extremes on a spectrum of sociability, defined by a heightened form of group identity. The prehistory of the process whereby 'enemies' are demonised is explored from early conceptions of monstrosity through Christian conceptions of the devil and witchcraft, and the persecution of heresy. Part Two surveys the major dystopian moments in twentieth century despotisms, focussing in particular upon Nazi Germany, Stalinism, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. The concentration here is upon the political religion hypothesis as a key explanation for the chief excesses of communism in particular. Part Three examines literary dystopias. It commences well before the usual starting-point in the secondary literature, in anti-Jacobin writings of the 1790s. Two chapters address the main twentieth-century texts usually studied as representative of the genre, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The remainder of the section examines the evolution of the genre in the second half of the twentieth century down to the present.

An instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller from one of the world’s leading economists, offering a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, but left us unsatisfied “A magisterial history.”—​Paul Krugman Named a Best Book of 2022 by Financial Times * Economist * Fast Company Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo. Economist Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most iconic, translated, and influential texts of the European Renaissance. This Handbook of specially commissioned and original essays brings together for the first time three different ways of thinking about the book: in terms of its renaissance contexts, its vernacular translations, and its utopian legacies. It has been developed to allow readers to consider these different facets of Utopia in relation to each other and to provide fresh and original contributions to our understanding of the book's creation, vernacularization, and afterlives. In so doing, it provides an integrated overview of More's text, as well as new contributions to the range of scholarship and debates that Utopia continues to attract. An especially innovative feature is that it allows readers to follow Utopia across time and place, unpacking the often-revolutionary moments that encouraged its translation by new generations of writers as far afield as France, Russia, Japan, and China. The Handbook is organized in four sections: on different aspects of the origins and contexts of Utopia in the 1510s; on histories of its translation into different vernaculars in the early modern and modern eras; and on various manifestations of utopianism up to the present day. The Handbook's Introduction outlines the biography of More, the key strands of interpretation and criticism relating to the text, the structure of the Handbook, and some of its recurring themes and issues. An appendix provides an overview of Utopia for readers new to the text.

On April 4, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and The New York Public Library will present a major exhibition, displaying more than 400 books, manuscripts, drawings, prints, maps, photographs, and other original material from both libraries. This work is the catalog for the American exhibition. Through stirring essays by Roland Schaer and other leading scholars on utopian thought, the book will wxplore the long tradition of thought and art that has envisioned the "perfect place,"moving from classical antiquity to the present. It is conveniently divided into four parts: I. The Classical and Judeo-Christian models for the Western Idea of Utopia; II. The Flowering of Utopian Imagination from Thomas Moore to the Enlightenment; III. Utopia in History; and IV. The Utopias and Dystopias of the 20th Century. Along with a dazzling selection of paintings, illuminations, and other items from the Bibliotheque Nationale's noted collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, The New York Public Library contributions include first or important editions of seminal works of utopian thought, political science, history, and fiction since the invention of printing. As well, The New York Public Library contributes beautiful illustrations from its collection of 16th century drawings of Theodore de Bry, posters from the Soviet Union and the 1939 World's Fair in New York, engravings from colonial times, and illuminationed manuscripts. Lavishly illustrated with many full color representations, this book will appeal to scholars and students of philosophy, history, and art, in addition to general readers curious about utopian thought.

In his book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2007), Fredric Jameson analyzes the multiple components of utopia and the possibility of achieving utopia in the near future. As this book argues, however, human civilization will never achieve utopia unless humans reach a state of pure consciousness in which they will use their full mental potential and avoid making blunders in life that would undermine the possibility of a utopia. This book develops a non-teleological, comparative poetics between Western and Sanskrit literary traditions by analyzing their opposing theories of language, consciousness and meaning. This comparison seeks to demonstrate the complementary nature of their two perspectives: the objective, conceptual emphasis of contemporary Western theory; and the subjective experiential emphasis of Sanskrit poetics. The potential contribution to the West of Indian culture in general, and Sanskrit poetics in particular, centers on the phenomenon of direct experience. Without the direct experience of pure consciousness, humans will not achieve a state of utopia because they will remain entangled in materialism without access to idealism or spiritualism available only through the direct experience of the unity of pure consciousness or the void of conceptions.