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School has never been easy for Timothy Speare. He's had his share of strict teachers, bullies, mean girls, and stressful amounts of homework. If that's not enough, he and his two best friends are labeled as the Nerdy Trio by the whole school. But his junior year of high school might be his toughest yet after he learns a dark secret. Some of the students aren't real . . . They're Fictional. Coming from a world where fiction is fact, literature's greatest villains have banded together and have invaded our non-Fictional world. They may look like ordinary high school students, but in secret they are monsters, witches, and other villains in disguise with plans to take over the world. They may not be the most popular kids on campus, but the Nerdy Trio may be the only hope of stopping this true-to-life Fictional evil. They've read about heroes. Now the Nerdy Trio will learn what it means to be a hero when they step up to defend their world. Joining forces with a mysterious new girl, they will find magical items, face great danger, and learn about the dark history of their school--all in their mission to bring about the end of the Fictionals.

“What’s it like, not being real?” In LA, where today’s star is tomorrow’s busboy, discarded “Fictionals”—characters spun into flesh-and-blood by technology—are everywhere. Screenwriter Niles Golan’s therapist is a Fictional. So is his best friend. So (maybe) is the woman in the bar he can’t stop staring at. It’s getting so you can’t tell who’s real and who’s not. Niles isn’t completely sure how real he is… “A fascinating tour-de-force” ***** SFX Magazine “Worthy of comparison with Philip K. Dick” ***** Starburst Magazine “A breathtakingly clever writer” ***** Amazing Stories “A book you want to endlessly quote” ***** Den of Geek

Finalist, 2022 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization. From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.

In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods Umberto Eco shares with us his Secret Life as a reader—his love for MAD magazine, for Scarlett O'Hara, for the nineteenth-century French novelist Nerval's Sylvie, for Little Red Riding Hood, Agatha Christie, Agent 007 and all his ladies. We see, hear, and feel Umberto Eco, the passionate reader who has gotten lost over and over again in the woods, loved it, and come back to tell the tale, The Tale of Tales. Eco tells us how fiction works, and he also tells us why we love fiction so much. This is no deconstructionist ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz to reveal his paltry tricks, but the Wizard of Art himself inviting us to join him up at his level, the Sorcerer inviting us to become his apprentice.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the analysis of fictional worlds in a set of fifteen arts, including theatre, opera, figurative ballet, mime, audio drama, figurative drawing/painting, figurative sculpture, strip cartoon, animation, puppet theatre, still photography, photo-novel, silent movie, cinema and TV drama. Due to their extreme differences, the combination of different arts in the description of a single fictional world, and the translation from one medium to another, are considered problematic. While such differences do not concern fictional creativity, which applies the same poetic and rhetoric rules whatever the medium, it is widely accepted that the problem lies in the extreme differences between the mediums of description. In contrast, this study explores their common grounds. These arts are iconic in nature, and if 'iconicity' is re-defined in terms of imprinting images on matter and mediation of language, and as reflecting the common roots of these mediums in a preverbal mode of imagistic thinking, therein is an explanation of their possible combination and translation from one medium to another without impairing the receivers' reading, interpreting and experiencing capacities. Eli Rozik analyses numerous fictional worlds in all these arts, produced during the last 2,500 years of artistic creativity, especially in theatre, art and cinema. This book presupposes that principles underlying the generation of descriptions of fictional worlds by the theatre medium, as proposed in two earlier works (Generating Theatre Meaning and Fictional Thinking), also apply to all the iconic/fictional arts. The text-book format of the volume has been purposefully designed to address the needs of undergraduate and postgraduate students, suiting the structure of university courses and providing all necessary information to access the images/artistic works discussed in the volume via the web and Google. This inter-art journey from theatre theory to the arts is compelling reading for all those involved and engaged in artistic creativity.

Ever since the 1990s, school shootings have shocked the public in their brutality, their suddenness, and their inexplicability. While film and literature have played a role in the heated debates about so-called copycat crimes, the growing body of fictionalizations of school shootings has been neglected thus far. However, in a discourse in which the boundaries between fiction and reality are increasingly blurred, this book shows how fiction shapes and structures, challenges and disrupts cultural processes of meaning-making. Hence, for a better understanding of the school shooting phenomenon, the relevance of fiction on all levels of discourse construction requires thorough analysis. This book therefore develops a new approach to the role of fiction for contemporary forms of excessive violence. By combining narrative theory with insights from sociology and other disciplines, it provides the means for apprehending and describing the relevance of fiction for contemporary discourses. Furthermore, it provides exemplary analyses of more specific functions of literary and filmic fictionalizations of school shootings between 2000 and 2016.