Cosmicomics is a collection of twelve short stories by Italo Calvino first published in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968. The stories were originally published between 1964 and 1965 in the Italian periodicals Il Caffè and Il Giorno. Each story takes a scientific theory, and builds an imaginative story around it. An always-extant being called Qfwfq explicitly narrates all of the stories save two. Every story is a memory of an event in the history of the universe.
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a 1973 short work of philosophical fiction by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. With deliberately both vague and vivid descriptions, the narrator depicts a summer festival in the utopian city of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" was nominated for the Locus Award for Best Short Fiction in 1974 and won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974.
Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.
Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison's first novel, published by Random House in 1952. It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early 20th century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events. Narration is a required element of all written stories, presenting the story in its entirety. It is optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.
Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, originally published as The Coming Race, is a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, published anonymously in 1871.
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" is a fantasy short story written in 1935 by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. In his autobiographical essay, Borges wrote about "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", "it now seems to me to foreshadow and even to set the pattern for those tales that were somehow awaiting me, and upon which my reputation as a storyteller was to be based."
Mark Leyner is an American postmodernist author.
The First Men in the Moon is a scientific romance, originally serialised in The Strand Magazine and The Cosmopolitan from November 1900 to June 1901 and published in hardcover in 1901, by the English author H. G. Wells, who called it one of his "fantastic stories". The novel tells the story of a journey to the Moon undertaken by the two protagonists: a businessman narrator, Mr. Bedford; and an eccentric scientist, Mr. Cavor. Bedford and Cavor discover that the Moon is inhabited by a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilisation of insect-like creatures they call "Selenites". The inspiration seems to come from the famous 1865 book by Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, and the opera by Jacques Offenbach from 1875. Verne's novel also uses the word "Selenites" to describe inhabitants of the Moon.
"The Outsider" is a short story by American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between March and August 1921, it was first published in Weird Tales, April 1926. In this work, a mysterious individual who has been living alone in a castle for as long as he can remember decides to break free in search of human contact and light. "The Outsider" is one of Lovecraft's most commonly reprinted works and is also one of the most popular stories ever to be published in Weird Tales.
Fiction Collective Two (FC2) is an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of avant-garde, experimental fiction supported in part by the University of Utah, the University of Alabama Press, Central Michigan University, Illinois State University, private contributors, arts organizations and foundations, and contest fees.
"The Festival" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in October 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a 1974 nonfiction narrative book by American author Annie Dillard. Told from a first-person point of view, the book details Dillard's explorations near her home, and various contemplations on nature and life. The title refers to Tinker Creek, which is outside Roanoke in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Dillard began Pilgrim in the spring of 1973, using her personal journals as inspiration. Separated into four sections that signify each of the seasons, the narrative takes place over the period of one year.
"The Book" is an unfinished short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, believed to have been written in late 1933. It was first published in the journal Leaves in 1938, after Lovecraft's death.
Fight Club is a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. It follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. The protagonist finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups, after his doctor remarks that insomnia is not "real suffering" and that he should find out what it is really like to suffer. The protagonist then meets a mysterious man named Tyler Durden and establishes an underground fighting club as radical psychotherapy.
Mention My Name in Atlantis, being, at last, the true account of the calamitous destruction of the great island kingdom together with a narrative of its wondrous intercourses with a superior race of other-worldlings, as transcribed from the manuscript of a survivor, Hoptor the Vintner, for the enlightenment of a dubious posterity is a humorous fantasy novel written by John Jakes purporting to give the "true" history of the sinking of the lost continent of Atlantis. It was first published in paperback by DAW Books in October 1972, and reprinted by the same publisher in September 1975 and August 1976; the later printings featured new cover art by Michael Whelan. A new paperback edition with an added introduction by the author was published by Bart Books in January 1988, and an ebook edition was issued by Open Road Integrated Media in December 2014. The book has also been translated into German and Italian.
Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation is a Fiction Collective Two book published by Black Ice Books in 1992 edited by Larry McCaffery. It is a collection of innovative fiction, graphic art, and various unclassifiable texts written by some of the most radical literary talents who McCaffery classifies as Avantpop. In his introductory chapter, McCaffery calls these writers "a new breed of pop-culture demolition artists". These writers include cult figures such as Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delany, Harold Jaffe and Derek Pell, as well as young new writers such as Euridice, Mark Leyner, and William T. Vollmann.
The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialised in Pearson's Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in 1897. The full novel was first published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann. The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between humankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother in London as southern England is invaded by Martians. It is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon.
The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon was the first of three satirical novels written by Cyrano de Bergerac. It was published posthumously in 1657 and, along with its companion work The States and Empires of the Sun, is considered one of the earliest published science fiction stories. Arthur C. Clarke credited the book with the first description of rocket-powered spaceflight, and with the invention of the ramjet.
The idea of a fourth dimension has been a factor in the evolution of modern art, but use of concepts relating to higher dimensions has been little discussed by academics in the literary world. From the late 19th century onwards, many writers began to make use of possibilities opened up by the exploration of such concepts as hypercube geometry. While many writers took the fourth dimension to be one of time, others preferred to think of it in spatial terms, and some associated the new mathematics with wider changes in modern culture.
