Intertextuality has signaled change, appropriation, adaptation, and derivation. It has focused readers on irresolvable questions of influence and origination, progressive or regressive movement across continents, periods, and media. Inhabited by Stories: Critical Essays on Tales Retold takes a different approach. What would a model of literary study look like that steps out of time’s river and embraces not only the presence and proximity of the world to the senses, but also of the past and the future to the present here and now? When stories inhabit us, imagination and memory extend our ability to see and feel. Phenomenological experience is lived, not just thought. Such a perspective suggests that the past and future inhabit the present, increase the depth of sensory perception itself, and enrich the range of our affective and ethical responses. Grounded in the lived experience of reading, this perspective offers an alternative to an idea of intertextuality as simply following lines of influence and appropriation. It focuses on the expansion of experience created by telling and retelling stories. Ironically, for literary theorists and critics, perhaps the highest form of both praise and critique is a tale retold, since such retellings attest to literature’s instructive power and its perennial regeneration.

Stuck in a state of purgatory in the Washington State house in which he lived and died, Evan Molloy, who had shot himself to death for a reason he cannot recall, now must deal with the home's new inhabitant, Maureen Keniston.

"The lives of Quimby's finely drawn characters interweave to produce a panorama as wide and full of light as the near–desert setting." —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review Meg Mogrin sells pricey houses, belongs to the mayor's inner circle, and knows more than she's letting on about her sister's death. Isaac Samson lives in a tent and believes Thomas Edison invented the Reagan presidency. When their town attracts a game–changing development, Isaac is displaced by the town's crackdown on vagrancy. As Isaac struggles to regain stability, Meg contends with conflicting roles of assisting the developer while serving on the homeless coalition. Isaac's quest to return a lost artifact soon intrudes into Meg's tidy world, digging up a part of her past she'd rather remained buried. Inhabited, a sister novel to Charlie Quimby's acclaimed Monument Road, returns to the Grand Valley of western Colorado to explore the dimensions of loss, the boundaries of compassion, and the endurance of love. CHARLIE QUIMBY is the author of Monument Road, an Indie Next List pick and Booklist Editors' Choice. He began his writing career as playwright and arts journalist, veered into corporate communications and then founded a marketing agency that now purrs along without him. Along the way, he collected awards and developed the notion he had a few good novels in him. A native Coloradan and adopted Minnesotan, he is at home in both places.

When Maxim Kammerer, a young space explorer from twenty-second-century Earth, crash-lands on an uncharted world, he thinks of himself as a latter-day Robinson Crusoe. Eager to establish first contact with the planet's humanlike inhabitants, he finds himself increasingly entangled in their primitive way of life. After his experiences in their nightmarish military, criminal justice, and mental health systems, Maxim begins to realize that his sojourn on this radioactive and war-scarred world will not be a walk in the park. The Inhabited Island is one of the Strugatsky brothers' most popular and acclaimed novels, yet the only previous English-language edition (Prisoners of Power) was based on a version heavily censored by Soviet authorities. Now, in a sparkling new edition by award-winning translator Andrew Bromfield, this land-mark novel can be newly appreciated by both longtime Strugatsky fans and new explorers of the Russian science fiction masters' astonishingly rich body of work.

People are key elements of wild places. At the same time, human entanglements with wild ecologies involve extractivism, the growth of resource-based economies, and imperial-colonial expansion, activities that are wreaking havoc on our planet. Through an ethnographic exploration of Canada’s ten UNESCO Natural World Heritage sites, Inhabited reflects on the meanings of wildness, wilderness, and natural heritage. As we are introduced to local inhabitants and their perspectives, Phillip Vannini and April Vannini ask us to reflect on the colonial and dualist assumptions behind the received meaning of wild, challenging us to reimagine wildness as relational and rooted in vitality. Over the three years they spent in and around these sites, they learned from Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples about their entanglements with each other and with non-human animals, rocks, plants, trees, sky, water, and spirits. The stories, actions, and experiences they encountered challenge conventional narratives of wild places as uninhabited by people and disconnected from culture and society. While it might be tempting to dismiss the idea of wildness as outdated in the Anthropocene era, Inhabited suggests that rethinking wildness offers a better – if messier – way forward. Part geography and anthropology, part environmental and cultural studies, and part politics and ecology, Inhabited balances a genuine love of nature’s vitality with a culturally responsible understanding of its interconnectedness with more-than-human ways of life.

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years. This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

Houses creak, shudder, moan, whistle, and whine. With eye-like windows and doors that look like tunnel entrances to the unknown, houses lend themselves to our primal and persistent sense of living among ghosts. Includes Ann Radcliff's touchstone essay, "On the Supernatural in Poetry," along with brief author biographies.