Service Alert
Website maintenance April 24 10pm ET
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
Showing 1 - 20 of 48 items
By Lois Lowry. 1993
Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the Receiver of Memories--a profession shared by only one…
other in his community--and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives. Newbery Medal. For grades 6-9 and older readers. 1993By Kiera Cass. 2014
As the Selection competition approaches its finish, America and Prince Maxon must decide if they are truly meant for each…
other. Sequel to The Elite (BR 21116). For senior high and older readers. 2014By Kiera Cass. 2015
After her parents had a successful match, in The Selection Series (DB 79319), Princess Eadlyn, the heir to the throne,…
must go through her own Selection process. However, Eadlyn remains unenthusiastic about the prospect of having thirty-five strange boys vying for her attention. For senior high and older readers. 2015By Kiera Cass. 2016
Events at the palace force Eadlyn to make an important choice, knowing that her Selection might not lead her to…
the fairytale ending her parents found. Sequel to The Heir (DB 84199). For senior high and older readers. 2016By Kiera Cass. 2012
When Prince Maxon comes of marrying age in the caste-divided nation of Illéa, thirty-five single young women compete in the…
Selection--a chance to win the prince's heart. America Singer reluctantly enters the contest and is chosen as a candidate, but loves another. For senior high and older readers. 2012By Joelle Charbonneau. 2014
Tensions between the United Commonwealth and the rebel alliance intensify, with deadly action looming on the horizon. Meanwhile, gifted student…
Cia Vale, unsure of which side to trust, must convince her fellow students to believe in her. Sequel to Independent Study (DB 78427). Violence. For senior high and older readers. 2014By Lois Lowry. 2012
After a difficult labor, fourteen-year-old birthmother Claire has a baby boy who is immediately rescued by Jonas, from The Giver…
(DB 37689). Claire knows she shouldn't search for her "product" but, overwhelmed by a sense of loss, she does anyway. For senior high and older readers. 2012By David Lubar. 2003
Eighth-grader Taylor and her twin brother, Ryan, are complete opposites. So when trouble-making Ryan discovers mysterious alien disks that enable…
him to become legends from the past--Babe Ruth, Albert Einstein, and others--Taylor tries to keep him out of trouble. For grades 5-8. 2003By John Christopher. 1992
England in 2052 is a divided nation. Recently orphaned thirteen-year-old Rob Randall, who lives in the Conurb, has been sent…
to a boarding school. Rob finds the technological community oppressive and makes his escape into the County, where life seems more serene. But the County society, ruled by the "Guardians," is even more tyrannical. For grades 6-9By Suzette Haden Elgin, Julie Vedder. 1987
An instant cult classic, and groundbreaking forerunner to Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale. Native Tongue Trilogy revealed to its audiences…
a frightening future world where the women of Earth are once again property.In Volume II of the trilogy, the women have at last decided to spread the language using the Roman Catholic church. But when a handful of priests discover the plot, they move to stamp it out with their own female agent, Sister Miriam Rose. But Sister Miriam has plans of her own. . . .By Susan Merrill Squier. 2004
Embryo adoptions, stem cells capable of transforming into any cell in the human body, intra- and inter-species organ transplantation--these and…
other biomedical advances have unsettled ideas of what it means to be human, of when life begins and ends. In the first study to consider the cultural impact of the medical transformation of the entire human life span, Susan Merrill Squier argues that fiction--particularly science fiction--serves as a space where worries about ethically and socially charged scientific procedures are worked through. Indeed, she demonstrates that in many instances fiction has anticipated and paved the way for far-reaching biomedical changes. Squier uses the anthropological concept of liminality--the state of being on the threshold of change, no longer one thing yet not quite another--to explore how, from the early twentieth century forward, fiction and science together have altered not only the concept of the human being but the contours of human life. Drawing on archival materials of twentieth-century biology; little-known works of fiction and science fiction; and twentieth- and twenty-first century U. S. and U. K. government reports by the National Institutes of Health, the Parliamentary Advisory Group on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation, and the President's Council on Bioethics, she examines a number of biomedical changes as each was portrayed by scientists, social scientists, and authors of fiction and poetry. Among the scientific developments she considers are the cultured cell, the hybrid embryo, the engineered intrauterine fetus, the child treated with human growth hormone, the process of organ transplantation, and the elderly person rejuvenated by hormone replacement therapy or other artificial means. Squier shows that in the midst of new phenomena such as these, literature helps us imagine new ways of living. It allows us to reflect on the possibilities and perils of our liminal lives.By Suzette Haden Elgin, Susan Squier. 1984
Called "fascinating" by the New York Times upon its first publication in 1984, Native Tongue won wide critical praise and…
cult status, and has often been compared to the futurist fiction of Margaret Atwood. Set in the twenty-second century, the novel tells of a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights and banned from public life. Earth's wealth depends on interplanetary commerce with alien races, and linguists ---a small, clannish group of families ---have become the ruling elite by controlling all interplanetary communication. Their women are used to breed perfect translators for all the galaxies' languages.Nazareth Chornyak, the most talented linguist of the family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for trade organizations, supervising the children's language education, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth comes to discover is that a slow revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them from men's control."Native Tongue brings to life not only the possibility of a women's language, but a rationale for one,"--Village Voice"Elgin takes up more than linguistics, of course--everything from religion to sex...the story is absolutely compelling."--Women's Review of BooksSuzette Haden Elgin is author of twelve science fiction novels and is widely know for her best-selling series The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and for The Grandmother Principles. She is director of the Ozark Center for Language Studies and is professor emerita of linguistics at San Diego State University.Susan Squier is Julia Brill professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University.By Eric Bogosian. 1993
By Daphne Patai, Katharine Burdekin. 1985
Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, this novel projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women…
as we know them. They are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. Not even the memory of culture remains. The plot centers on a "misfit" who asks, as readers must, "How could this have happenned?" Ann J. Lane calls the novel a "brilliant, chilling dystopia." "This is a powerful, haunting vision of the inner and outer worlds of male violence."-Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One, 1884-1933By L. Ron Hubbard. 2008
Boldly go to worlds where no one has gone before. Fanner Marston was raised a slave as a child, became…
a petty street thief as a teen, and now masters his own craft and crew as a grown man. He's also gone completely mad. Driven by privation, with a vicious greed and slavering lust for power, Marston alone of forty men has survived the perilous trek through a blistering desert to the magical city of Parva, where legend says a secret awaits which will give him absolute control over the Universe. However, Marston finds the key to all power is not at all what he expected. . . ALSO INCLUDES THE SCIENCE FICTION STORIES "SPACE CAN," "THE BEAST" AND "THE SLAVER""Tremendous attention to detail ... audiences will find themselves captivated from beginning to end."--Publishers Weekly starred reviewBy L. Ron Hubbard. 2002
Suspense, politics, war, humor and intergalactic finance. A towering masterwork of science fiction adventure and one of the best-selling science…
fiction novels of all time, L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth opens with breathtaking scope on an Earth dominated for 1,000 years by an alien invader and man is an endangered species. From the handful of surviving humans a courageous leader emerges Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who challenges the invincible might of the alien Psychlo empire in a battle of epic scale, danger and intrigue with the fate of the Earth and of the universe in the tenuous balance. "Tight plotting, furious action and have at'em entertainment." --Kirkus ReviewBy L. Ron Hubbard. 2008
Captivating new worlds. Once there had been a single government of Earth controlled by the western races, but the long-oppressed…
people of Asia finally struck back with a "cohesion projector." In an instant, the device established a solid, invisible wall of space--creating a dividing line between the superpowers, with the Asiatic Federation inside and the United Continents outside.Both powers are tenuously perched on the brink of war until George Marquis Lorrilard comes along. A sometime lieutenant of the pitiful handful of space guards known as the United Continents Space Navy, he's used the experience to become a space exploiter. Far less driven by altruism than by the ferocious thirst and hunger of greed, Lorrilard sets a course to change forever the fate of Earth and the stars. ALSO INCLUDES THE SCIENCE FICTION STORIES "FINAL ENEMY" AND "THE AUTOMAGIC HORSE""...enjoyable, entertaining, and lighthearted..."--BooklistToday the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to…
the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries-and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)-captivated readers for nearly three decades.Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero. The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from "The Horror on the Links” (1925) to "The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by George Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg.By Joseph Packer, Ethan Stoneman. 2018
In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism…
by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction.Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism.While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.By Wallace Shawn. 2009
"Among living American writers for the theater today, Wallace Shawn is among the most respected by his peers and championed…
by serious critics."--Don Shewey"The play is bound to delve further into the world that Shawn began to explore so precipitously nearly thirty-five years ago: one filled with ideas, wherein the action is the domestication of cruelty."--The New YorkerGrasses of a Thousand Colors is a poetic epic that tells the story of a scientist (Ben), his wife (Cerise), and his two mistresses (Robin and Rose), as they fend for their lives in a world much like ours, yet one savagely close to extinction. Due to the scientific manipulation of the world's crops, a destructive system for which Ben is partly responsible, there is very little nourishment left to be had, except for those most privileged and connected. Despite the dying off of most of the world, these characters manage to survive, at times tasting the good life, admiring the beauties of nature, feasting on animalistic sex, and finding love. The play raises issues of redemption, forgiveness, and responsibility as it recounts a somewhat passionate, erotic adventure story.Wallace Shawn is the author of Our Late Night (winner of the OBIE Award for Best Play), Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Designated Mourner, The Fever, and the screenplay for My Dinner with Andre, in which he starred. Grasses of a Thousand Colors, Shawn's first full-length play in ten years, will be produced in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2009. Shawn is a well-known film and television actor. He resides in New York City.