The Shadow of Doubt
Lynne Tillman
Excerpt

One may surely give oneself up to a line of thought, and follow it up as far as it leads, simply out of scientific curiosity, or—if you prefer—as advocatus diaboli, without, however, making a pact with the devil about it . . . only that people unfortunately are seldom impartial where they are concerned with the ultimate things, the great problems of science and of life.

Adrift in the Fluidium
Mark Alice Durant
Excerpt

Mr. Peanut’s Bottle Rocket
During the first five years of my life, my family lived in a veterans’ housing project consisting of a dozen or so barrack-like row houses set up along the Mystic River outside of Boston.

Insubstantial Pageants: Spirit Visions, Soul Traces
Marina Warner
Excerpt

1: The Eye of the Imagination
In the early seventeenth century, Robert Fludd, an Oxford-educated physician of wide-ranging and esoteric learning, pictured the interior of the brain containing several interlinked souls, including the imaginative soul: “fantasy or imagination itself,” writes Fludd, “since it beholds not the true pictures of corporeal or sensory things, but their likenesses and as it were, their shadows.”

Synthetic Spectres: Theses on Anomalies
Jane D. Marsching
Excerpt

1: Definitions
From science fiction to theme parks, from government cover-ups to papal succession, from farmyard mutilation to cosmic phenomena, the paranormal reads like a list of hot tabloid secrets.