Victoria Nelson teaches in the Goddard College graduate program in creative writing.

In a remarkable scholarly book, The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson argues that our sense of the supernatural and yearning for immortality has been displaced from religion to such expressions of popular culture as superheroes, robots and cyborgs.

• * Preface * Grotto, An Opening * Early Adventures of the Earthly Gods * The Puppet Tractates * The Strange History of the American Fantastic * H.P. Lovecraft and the Great Heresies * Symmes Hole, or the South Polar Grotto * Is This Real or Am I Crazy? * Two Old Birds and Their New Feathers * The New Expressionists * The Hermeticon of Umbertus E. * The Great Twentieth-Century Puppet Upgrade * The Door in the Sky * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index

Victoria Nelson teaches in the Goddard College graduate program in creative writing.

In a remarkable scholarly book, The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson argues that our sense of the supernatural and yearning for immortality has been displaced from religion to such expressions of popular culture as superheroes, robots and cyborgs.

• * Preface * Grotto, An Opening * Early Adventures of the Earthly Gods * The Puppet Tractates * The Strange History of the American Fantastic * H.P. Lovecraft and the Great Heresies * Symmes Hole, or the South Polar Grotto * Is This Real or Am I Crazy? * Two Old Birds and Their New Feathers * The New Expressionists * The Hermeticon of Umbertus E. * The Great Twentieth-Century Puppet Upgrade * The Door in the Sky * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index

Victoria Nelson teaches in the Goddard College graduate program in creative writing.

In a remarkable scholarly book, The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson argues that our sense of the supernatural and yearning for immortality has been displaced from religion to such expressions of popular culture as superheroes, robots and cyborgs.

• * Preface * Grotto, An Opening * Early Adventures of the Earthly Gods * The Puppet Tractates * The Strange History of the American Fantastic * H.P. Lovecraft and the Great Heresies * Symmes Hole, or the South Polar Grotto * Is This Real or Am I Crazy? * Two Old Birds and Their New Feathers * The New Expressionists * The Hermeticon of Umbertus E. * The Great Twentieth-Century Puppet Upgrade * The Door in the Sky * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index