Bypassing conventional science fiction and fantasy, in which the language behaves itself, we will travel through some imaginary worlds made of language at its most slippery, tricky, and delirious. Any story can be a vehicle to take us somewhere new, allowing us to explore other worlds, other bodies, other pleasures and fears. The books we will read in this class are vehicles as strange as the territory we are exploring. Here, getting lost is not a problem but a prerequisite. “The sentence provides us a space for wandering,” says Renee Gladman. “How in prose, in that gathering of sentences can we position ourselves as adventurers […] of space?” Reading these books, we will become adventurers, putting down our maps and compasses and crossing the borders of our familiar world into an experience of the truly foreign. Readings will take us from such earlier fantasists as Borges and Calvino through genre-bending contemporary writers like Gladman, Antoine Volodine, Joyelle McSweeney and Cathy Park Hong.