Verisimilitudes: Essays and Approximations

Literary and speculative essays, many resembling truth, on the paranormal and other imaginative topics - ranging from Madame Blavatsky to make-believe musicians - by Fortnightly Review columnist and novelist James Gallant. James Gallant writes about some of the most intellectually challenging and inherently fascinating subjects imaginable: the UFO phenomenon, occult materializations and the like. His suggestion that invasions of occult influences become especially likely in disorderly societies like our own-in the gaps, in the interstices of what we think of as the real but which is in fact a social construction, and a wobbly one at that-is compelling. - Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University, author of Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religion