Charles Kingsley : “Tomfoolery with a Serious Purpose”
By Kenny Chumbley
No one familiar with Victorian literature would rate Charles Kingsley’s books among the very best except, maybe, his children’s fantasy, The Water-Babies.
Charles Kingsley...
Money-Changers in the Temple: Evil Bankers in Literature and Film – By Tim Wenzell
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies” –Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Taylor, May 28,...
Lewis Carroll and Nonsense – By Kenny Chumbley
“It sounds uncommon nonsense.” The Mock Turtle
Among the storied authors of children’s...
The Formula for Fantasy – By Kenny Chumbley
All fairy tales are fantasy, but not all fantasies are fairy tales. Fairy tales require fairy folk (elves, gnomes, etc.). The Three Little Pigs...
The Personality of Phantasy – By Kenny Chumbley
My qualifications for writing about fantasy literature/fairy tales are slight. As a child, I wore out the Whitman...
Time to Rise – Cli-Fi and the Responsibility of New Visions – By Jim...
Cli-Fi cuts too close to home. Climate Fiction isn’t exactly speculative fiction or science fiction. It is the right here, right now. Our destructiveness...
The Stories We Tell Ourselves: A Look Through the Lenses of Zen Buddhism and...
In his poem Can Palat W.S. Merwin reminisces about an abandoned, hillside farmstead he encountered as a young man. On a terrace he finds
an...
When Earth and Sky Intermingle : Science and Poetry – By Michael G. Smith
Poetry has never revealed its full face to anyone. Its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. It defies any attempt at a...
Notes on Conceptual Fiction – By Ted Gioia
1.
Is it possible that the idea of "realism" as a guiding principle for fiction is itself unrealistic? After all, there are no Newtonian laws in stories—an...
