Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Selected by award-winning editor Sean Wallace and published by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints:"Rare Bindings" by Matthew Cheney"Burial" by Kristi DeMeester (reprint)"Marshman" by Sara Omer"Breathe, Blow, Burn" by Ai Jiang (reprint)

Magic stops. Men vanish. Worlds end. Life goes on.The stories in The Last Vanishing Man start with the end of the world, as a narrator seeks to imagine how the actions of an American terrorist ripple through his family. American violence and masculinity are topics that weave through these stories, as characters of various genders and sexualities get scarred by the wounds of manhood. But though these stories bounce similar themes off each other, they are not narrow ...

In 2018, Matthew Cheney took a phrase from a poem by Emily Dickinson and named his new website Finite Eyes. There, he would chronicle his experience as a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at a regional state university in New Hampshire, a state averse to financing education. Soon, he would contend with the effects of the COVID pandemic on his university, colleagues, and students, and he would have a front-row seat for the defunding and devaluing of higher education in America...

What is the role of the author in times of crisis? Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form examines how Virginia Woolf, Samuel R. Delany, and J. M. Coetzee developed literary strategies in common to cope with crisis periods they were anticipating, living through, or looking back on. Matthew Cheney outlines how the three writers shaped their art to create an author/audience relationship congruent with the goals of critical pedagogy espoused by such thinkers as Paulo Freire and be...

A revised and expanded edition of a classic work of criticism exploring how science fiction is not about the future but about the potential of the present.In Starboard Wine, Samuel R. Delany explores the implications of his now-famous assertion that science fiction is not about the future. Rather, it uses the future as a means of talking about the present and its potentiality. By recognizing a text's specific "difference," we begin to see the quality of its...

From the four-time Nebula Award–winning author, a keystone text in literary theory and science fiction analyzing a 1972 work of dystopian fiction.The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—"Angouleme" was first published in 1978 to the intense interest of science fiction readers and the growing community of SF scholars. Recalling Nabokov's commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Roland Barthes's commentary on Bal...

Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Selected by award-winning editor Sean Wallace and published by Prime Books, this issue includes four all-new stories:"And A Piece Of Coal Where Her Heart Once Beat" by Suzanne J. Willis"Missing Dolls Around the World" by Ai Jiang"Hunger" by Matthew CheneyThe Last Sound You Hear" by Steve Rasnic Tem

This issue is the hot summer wind that dries your tears. We wait in the shade of the red rock, hoping there is still water in the soil. We fear to dig, but we must, because there are sprouts to be rescued. This issue contains stories about the bonds of family (for both good and ill), stories about the changes that come over us as the seasons shift, and stories about how we decide to linger.Here are stories from Sarina Dorie, Elad Haber, Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito, H. L. Fullerton, War...

From the four-time Nebula Award–winning author, an indispensable work of science fiction criticism, revised and expanded.Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essa...

In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fiction's ability to thrust its own ontological stat...

Aren't we actually sick of sex, of difference, of emancipation, of culture? With this provocative taunt, the indomitable sociologist Jean Baudrillard challenges us to face up to our deadly, technologically empowered renunciation of mortality and subjectivity as he grapples with the complex issues that define our postmillennial world. What does the advent and proliferation of cloning mean for our sense of ourselves as human beings? What does the turn of the millennium say about our relation...

Brian McHale provides a series of readings of a wide range of postmodernist fiction, from Eco's Foucault's Pendulum to the works of cyberpunk science-fiction, relating the works to aspects of postmodern popular culture.