Ebook: True stories & other essays

Cold. Winter night -- Ice -- Worst journey -- Shackleton -- Read my toes -- Borealism -- Huntford's Nansen, Huntford's Scott -- The uses of Antarctica -- Red. Siberian journal -- The Soviet moment -- Plenty -- Responsible fiction, irresponsible fact -- Idols of the marketplace -- Unicorn husbandry -- Sacred. Dear atheists -- Contra Dawkins -- Puritans -- Who is God? An answer for children -- C.S. Lewis as apologist -- What can science fiction tell us about God? -- Uneasy in Iran -- Wild theism -- The past as zombie hazard, and consolation -- Three ways of writing faith -- Unapologetically yours (1) -- Unapologetically yours (2) -- Technical. Difference engine -- Boffins -- Printed. Half in praise -- Kipling's jungle -- Robinson's Mars -- The amazing Terence -- You could read forever -- This grand cause of terror -- Bats of some kind -- In memoriam, Iain M. Banks -- The dyer's elbow.;"Francis Spufford's welcome first volume of collected essays gathers an array of his compelling writings from the 1990s to the present. He makes use of a variety of encounters with particular places, writers, or books to address deeper questions relating to the complicated relationship between story-telling and truth-telling. How must a nonfiction writer imagine facts, vivifying them to bring them to life? How must a novelist create a dependable world of story, within which facts are, in fact, imaginary? And how does a religious faith felt strongly to be true, but not provably so, draw on both kinds of writerly imagination? Ranging freely across topics as diverse as the medieval legends of Cockaigne, the Christian apologetics of C.S. Lewis, and the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, Spufford provides both fresh observations and thought-provoking insights. No less does he inspire an irresistible urge to turn the page and read on"--