Fantasy: How It Works (Hardbound-2022)

About the Book

Fantasy has become a dominant mode of storytelling and it mirrors our experiences and anxieties better than any representation of the merely real. This book poses two central questions about fantastic storytelling: how can it be meaningful if it doesn't claim to represent things as they are, and what kind of change can it make in the world?

About the Author
Scholar and editor Brian Attebery has won multiple awards for his work on fantasy and science fiction, mostly recently the World Fantasy Award for his longtime editorship of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. In 2019 he was the Leverhulme Visiting Professor in fantasy at the University of Glasgow. One of his projects there was helping to launch a scholarly series from Bloombury Academic, Perspectives on Fantasy, which he edits along with Dimitra Fimi and Matthew Sanger. He is the author of Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, among other books, and co-editor with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler of the Norton Book of Science Fiction. As editor of Le Guin's work for the Library of America he is currently working on a volume of her short fiction.