Literature

Guiding Questions

• How does each selection relate to this year’s theme?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of each genre for exploring the strange, the unusual, and the improbable? I.e., is a television show a better venue for a story about aliens than a poem?
• How does literature help us make sense of the unlikely human condition?
• What is the role of literature in a world that increasingly values more practical fields such as science, technology, engineering, and math? Is literature ultimately just entertainment?
• How does literature help us explore alternate lives and worlds? Does reading literature helps us develop empathy for those unlike ourselves, or is that asking too much of it?

Poems

• A Statistician to His Love | Peter Goldsworthy
• Ode to an Artichoke | Pablo Neruda
• Maybe All This & Thoughts Haunting Me in Busy Streets | Wisława Szymborska
• Flowers | Wendy Cope
• Hope is the thing with feathers | Emily Dickinson
• Praise | Robert Hass
• Kubla Khan | Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Road Not Taken | Robert Frost
• The Alphabet Conspiracy | Rita Mae Reese
• Another Planet | Dunya Mikhail
• Happiness | Jane Kenyon
• Lucky | Tony Hoagland
• Mars Haiku Contest | Assorted

Drama & Film

• Pushing Daisies (Season 1, Episode 1)
• Julius Caesar (Act III, Scene 2) | William Shakespeare
• Back to the Future (1985)

Longer Works

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (excerpt) | Douglas Adams
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapters I and II | Lewis Carroll
• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge | Ambrose Bierce
• Death and What Comes Next | Terry Pratchett
• The Colomber | Dino Buzzati
• Every Day (Day 5994) | David Levithan
• Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers | Lawrence Watt-Evans
• The Weight of Memories | Liu Cixin
• A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings | Gabriel Garcia Marquez