Cantara’s (Social) Notebook

Some fifteen years ago I was in bad health and could not work, and Lady Gregory brought me from cottage to cottage while she began to collect the stories in this book, and presently when I was at work again she went on with her collection alone till it grew to be, so far as I know, the most considerable book of its kind. Except that I had heard some story of "The Battle of the Friends" at Aran and had divined that it might be the legendary common accompaniment of death, she was not guided by any theory of mine, but recorded what came, writing it out at each day's end and in the country dialect. It was at this time mainly she got the knowledge of words that makes her little comedies of country life so beautiful and so amusing. As that ancient system of belief unfolded before us, with unforeseen probabilities and plausibilities, it was as though we had begun to live in a dream, and one day Lady Gregory said to me when we had passed an old man in the wood: "That o...

The Library of America has just brought together in a single volume four of Philip K. Dick’s most original novels from the 1960s: Hugo Award winner The Man in the High Castle (1962) which describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), which posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality and an interplanetary drug tycoon can transform himself into a godlike figure who can transcend death; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic society where status is measured by the possession of live animals and religious life is focused on a television personality; Ubik (1969), which depicts a future world of psychic espionage agents and cryonically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory “half-life”, pursues Dick’s theme of simulated realiti...