Speculative Fiction: Beyond a Novel’s Entertainment Value
The classroom is a place to equip students to better understand the world as it was and is. Speculative fiction can help.
Speculative Fiction: A Reading List
Speculative fiction, from Afrofuturism to Star Wars, offers students tools and methods for analyzing social movements, power structures, and utopian thinking.
Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Disappearance
In December 1926, Christie went missing for more than a week. Where did she go, and what was she up to?
Remembering Mavis Gallant
Shaped by her Canadian origins and early work as a journalist, expatriate Gallant used the short story to examine the sociopolitics of post-war Europe.
The Hybrid Heroines of “Bollywood Chick Lit”
Material consumption and marriage have different meanings for South Asian American women, and those meanings should shape the way we read Desi “chick lit.”
The Joy of Burglary
In the early 1900s, a fictional “gentleman burglar” named Raffles fascinated British readers, reflecting popular ideas about crime, class, and justice.
Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov
Living in exile in Germany, the young New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield found solace in studying—and copying—Chekhov’s short stories.
Shakespeare and Fanfiction
Despite an enduring slice of audience that treats his work as precious and mythic, most Shakespeare fans have rarely met an adaptive concept they didn’t like.
The Tricky Sentimentality of Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge
The Vietnamese American literary classic undermines the readers’ expectations of a redemptive narrative of immigration and memory.
We Dream of Genie
In antebellum America, the voyages and adventures of Sinbad and Aladdin in the Arabian Nights nourished a young nation's dreams.