Download or read book How Fantasy Becomes Reality written by Karen Dill-Shackleford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From smartphones to social media, from streaming videos to fitness bands, our devices bring us information and entertainment all day long, forming an intimate part of our lives. Their ubiquity represents a major shift in human experience, and although we often hold our devices dear, we do not always fully appreciate how their nearly constant presence can influence our lives for better and for worse. In this revised and expanded edition of How Fantasy Becomes Reality, social psychologist Karen E. Dill-Shackleford explains what the latest science tells us about how our devices influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In engaging, conversational prose, she discusses both the benefits and the risks that come with our current level of media saturation. The wide-ranging conversation explores Avatar, Mad Men, Grand Theft Auto, and Comic Con to address critical issues such as media violence, portrayals of social groups, political coverage, and fandom. Her conclusions will empower readers to make our favorite sources of entertainment and information work for us and not against us.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination written by Anna Abraham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human imagination manifests in countless different forms. We imagine the possible and the impossible. How do we do this so effortlessly? Why did the capacity for imagination evolve and manifest with undeniably manifold complexity uniquely in human beings? This handbook reflects on such questions by collecting perspectives on imagination from leading experts. It showcases a rich and detailed analysis on how the imagination is understood across several disciplines of study, including anthropology, archaeology, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and the arts. An integrated theoretical-empirical-applied picture of the field is presented, which stands to inform researchers, students, and practitioners about the issues of relevance across the board when considering the imagination. With each chapter, the nature of human imagination is examined - what it entails, how it evolved, and why it singularly defines us as a species.

Download or read book True Love Dates written by Debra K. Fileta and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is possible to find true love through dating. In True Love Dates, Debra Fileta encourages singles not to "kiss dating goodbye" but instead to experience a season of dating as a way to find real love. Through powerful, real-life stories and Fileta's personal journey, this book offers profound insights from the expertise of a professional counselor. Christians are looking for answers to finding true love. They are disillusioned with the church that has provided little practical application in the area of love and relationships. They're bombarded by Christian books that shun dating, idolize courting, fixate on spirituality, and in the end, offer little real relationship help. True Love Dates provides honest help for dating by providing a guide into vital relationship essentials. Debra is a professional Christian counselor who reaches millions with her popular blog, Truelovedates.com, and her book offers sound advice grounded in Christian spirituality. She delivers insight, direction, and counsel when it comes to entering the world of dating and learning to do it right the first time around. Drawing on the stories and struggles of hundreds of young men and women who have pursued the search for true love, Fileta helps readers bypass unnecessary pain while focusing on the things that really matter in the world of dating.

Download or read book Come Over to My House written by Theo LeSieg and published by Collins. This book was released on 1967 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children visit many different houses throughout the world.

Download or read book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks written by Ethan Gilsdorf and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An amazing journey through the thriving worlds of fantasy and gaming What could one man find if he embarked on a journey through fantasy world after fantasy world? In an enthralling blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir, forty-year-old former D&D addict Ethan Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds—from Boston to New Zealand, and Planet Earth to the realm of Aggramar. “For anyone who has ever spent time within imaginary realms, the book will speak volumes. For those who have not, it will educate and enlighten.” —Wired.com “Gandalf’s got nothing on Ethan Gilsdorf, except for maybe the monster white beard. In his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, Gilsdorf . . . offers an epic quest for reality within a realm of magic.” —Boston Globe “Imagine this: Lord of the Rings meets Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.” —National Public Radio’s “Around and About” “What does it mean to be a geek? . . . Fantasy Freaks andGaming Geeks tackles that question with strength and dexterity. . . . part personal odyssey, part medieval mid-life crisis, and part wide-ranging survey of all things freaky and geeky . . . playful . . . funny and poignant. . . . It’s a fun ride and it poses a question that goes to the very heart of fantasy, namely: What does the urge to become someone else tell us about ourselves?” —Huffington Post

Download or read book Fantasy and Mimesis Routledge Revivals written by Kathryn Hume and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Plato and Aristotle’s declaration of the essence of literature as imitation, western narrative has been traditionally discussed in mimetic terms. Marginalized fantasy- the deliberate from reality – has become the hidden face of fiction, identified by most critics as a minor genre. First published in 1984, this book rejects generic definitions of fantasy, arguing that it is not a separate or even separable strain in literary practice, but rather an impulse as significant as that of mimesis. Together, fantasy and mimesis are the twin impulses behind literary creation. In an analysis that ranges from the Icelandic sagas to science fiction, from Malory to pulp romance, Kathryn Hume systematically examines the various ways in which fantasy and mimesis contribute to literary representations of reality. A detailed and comprehensive title, this reissue will be of particular value to undergraduate literature students with an interest in literary genres and the centrality of literature to the creative imagination.

Download or read book Finding Truth in Fiction written by Karen Dill-Shackleford and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Finding Truth in Fiction, two media psychologists reveal that there's much more to our desire to seek out stories in film, TV, and books than simple diversion--fiction can help us find truth in our real lives. By exploring our relationship with fictional stories and characters, the authors will examine the influence of fiction on our identities, the paradox of trying to separate actors from the roles they play, and the types of stories we are drawn to over and over.

Download or read book Poison Sleep written by Tim Pratt and published by Spectra. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bad girl of the magical underworld is back and badder than ever Someone wants Marla Mason dead. Usually that’s not news. As chief sorcerer of Felport, someone always wants her dead. But this time she’s the target of a renegade assassin who specializes in killing his victims over days, months, or even years. Not to mention a mysterious knife-wielding killer in black who pops up in the most unexpected places. To make matters worse, an inmate has broken out of the Blackwing Institute for criminally insane sorcerers—a troubled psychic who can literally reweave the fabric of reality to match her own traumatic past. With her wisecracking partner Rondeau reluctantly in tow, Marla teams up with a “love-talker” whose dangerous erotic spells not even she can resist. Together they’re searching the rapidly transforming streets of Felport for a woman who’s become the Typhoid Mary of nightmares, infecting everything—and everyone—she touches with a chaos worse than death itself.

Download or read book Fantasy written by Kim-Anh Schreiber and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Film. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Part exegesis on Nobuhiko Obayashi's film HOUSE and part meditation on the ineffable specters that inhabit homes and ancestral histories, FANTASY is a daughter's story of her Vietnamese mother and their twin journeys towards belonging with one another and in the world. Where exilic, inherited memory encounters its limits, FANTASY reaches towards cult cinematic atmospheres, irreverent flowers, pop culture, and photographs with no images, making for a reading experience like no other. "Schreiber uses the fabric of cinema and horror to quasi-measure the length and width of her pre-adolescent and adolescent consciousness. It's a GORGEOUS dress that the ghost in her psyche demands that it wears before falling into ash. Here, in these immolatable, scriptive dialogues with all of her consanguineous, anecdotal, exegetical selves ('who become shoes without feet that walk back and forth' in a house that eats like hungry ghosts), her psyche is cut, recut, uncut, though not forgotten, un-linearly and nonchalantly and numerously, by her relationship to film and her relationship with her Vietnamese mother, surrogated mother in grandmother(s) and auntie(s). ... As Kim-Anh Schreiber seeks closure with the uncloseable, we see an acutely talented scholar and inventive memoirist." --Vi Khi Nao. "'Schreiber, the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee and a German immigrant, combines recognizable modes--memoir, criticism, dramatic play script--into something as uncategorizable as the film she deploys throughout the book as muse and foil: Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 post-Hiroshima 'horror-comedy' HOUSE, in which generations of women are trapped together in a haunted house. Beginning with extended considerations of the instability of memory ('an evocative curator'), of the 'impossible problem of drawing a picture,' and of the pull to use projection and doubling as bridges across gaps in experience and understanding, FANTASY finally resolves into a flickering, unstable but vivid portrait of a mother and daughter both separated and bonded by history, violence, human fallibility, and love." --Anna Moschovakis

Download or read book The Romance of Reality written by Bobby Azarian and published by BenBella Books. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we exist? For centuries, this question was the sole province of religion and philosophy. But now science is ready to take a seat at the table. According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning. But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by cutting-edge findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory—generally referred to as “complexity science.” Thanks to a new understanding of evolution, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the phenomenon known as emergence, a new cosmic narrative is taking shape: Nature’s simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight. In The Romance of Reality, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian explains the science behind this new view of reality and explores what it means for all of us. In engaging, accessible prose, Azarian outlines the fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics at the heart of the old assumptions about the universe’s evolution, and shows us the evidence that suggests that the universe is a “self-organizing” system, one that is moving toward increasing complexity and awareness. Cosmologist and science communicator Carl Sagan once said of humanity that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The Romance of Reality shows that this poetic statement in fact rests on a scientific foundation and gives us a new way to know the cosmos, along with a riveting vision of life that imbues existence with meaning—nothing supernatural required.

Download or read book Heir Apparent written by Vivian Vande Velde and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sample Text

Download or read book King of the Rising written by Kacen Callender and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King of the Rising is the searing conclusion to an unflinching and powerful Caribbean-inspired fantasy series about colonialism, resilience, and defiance. A revolution has swept through the islands of Hans Lollik and former slave Loren Jannik has been chosen to lead the survivors in a bid to free the islands forever. But the rebels are running out of food, weapons, and options. And as the Fjern inch closer to reclaiming Hans Lollik with every battle, Loren is faced with a choice that could shift the course of the revolution in their favor -- or doom it to failure. Praise for Islands of Blood and Storm: "A powerful look at colonialism, oppression, and rebellion, and all that it can cost the individuals involved." —Library Journal (starred review) "The book's absorbing setting, captivating lead, and relevant themes of race and class complement each other with alternating delicacy and savagery."—NPR Books "King of the Rising puts readers firmly into the minds of Callender’s unforgettable characters as it answers a spine-tingling set of questions: At the end of the war, who will survive and who will rule?” —BookPage Islands of Blood and Storm Queen of the Conquered King of the Rising

Download or read book Desires written by Barbara Deloto and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A trip to the antique store changes an occasional crossdresser forever. Ready for two weeks off from classes and feminizing himself for a little entertainment, Daniel ends up chasing his innermost fantasies and becomes a fully transformed shemale, called Daniela, with insatiable desires. A never-ending libido, with no way to stem it, forces Daniela to seek relief in any way possible. In the process of trying to satisfy her deepest desires, Daniela ends up becoming exactly what Daniel's inner thoughts and fantasies always were. Is that to return to a normal life as a genetic male who can turn his feminization on or off (and with a normal libido), or will he be stuck as a shemale with relentless desires... or will it be something in between? What was Daniel always dreaming of being? Start reading this hot and steamy 15,000-word LGBT fantasy now. Join this new adult tranny on her journey to become what she didn't even know she wanted. Look inside now.

Download or read book The Fantasy Fallacy written by Shannon Ethridge and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claims that sexual fantasies stem from past psychological tragedies, and argues that Christians should tap into God's love to overcome the desire to act out sexual fantasies in order to heal from past trauma.

Download or read book Odin s Child written by Siri Pettersen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic fantasy trilogy from Norway about thousand-year-old secrets, forbidden romance, and what happens to those who make a deal with the devil comes at last to the United States! "Blood magic, blackmail, and battle rock a rich world of fading magic to its core in this internationally bestselling Norwegian epic fantasy." - Publishers Weekly reviews Odin's Child I loved (Odin's Child) deeply from the first to the last word, and was instantly and thoroughly immersed. -- Laini Taylor, bestselling author of Daughter of Smoke and Bone. ...The story examines and upends everything its characters believe in, including their world, their history, their faith, and themselves, while intertwining elements of politics and Norse mythology with a side of forbidden romance. Kirkus Reviews The intrigue, scope, and depth of His Dark Materials, set in an immersive Nordic world as fierce and unforgettable as its characters. Rosaria Munda, author Fireborne/Flamefall - Aurelian Cycle The world building is stupendous. MidWest Book Review Imagine lacking something that everyone else has. Something that proves you belong to this world. Something so vital, that without it, you are nothing. A plague. A myth. A human.” Fifteen winters old, Hirka learns that she is an Odin's child – a tailless rot from another world. Despised. Dreaded. And hunted. She no longer knows who she is, and someone wants to kill her to keep it a secret. But there are worse things than humans, and Hirka is not the only creature to have broken through the gates… Odin’s Child is unique fantasy with Norse roots. An epic clash of xenophobia, blind faith and the right or will to lead. The first in a trilogy, Odin's Child is a thrilling modern fantasy epic.

Download or read book Black Sun Rising written by C.S. Friedman and published by Astra Publishing House. This book was released on 1992-09-01 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a millennium ago, Erna, a seismically active yet beautiful world was settled by colonists from far-distant Earth. But the seemingly habitable planet was fraught with perils no one could have foretold. The colonists found themselves caught in a desperate battle for survival against the fae, a terrifying natural force with the power to prey upon the human mind itself, drawing forth a person's worst nightmare images or most treasured dreams and indiscriminately giving them life. Twelve centuries after fate first stranded the colonists on Erna, mankind has achieved an uneasy stalemate, and human sorcerers manipulate the fae for their own profit, little realizing that demonic forces which feed upon such efforts are rapidly gaining in strength. Now, as the hordes of the dark fae multiply, four people—Priest, Adept, Apprentice, and Sorcerer—are about to be drawn inexorably together for a mission which will force them to confront an evil beyond their imagining, in a conflict which will put not only their own lives but the very fate of humankind in jeopardy.

Download or read book Seveneves written by Neal Stephenson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years. What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . . Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth. A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.