25 Wednesday Jan 2012
Wilum Pugmire takes a look at the kind of sumptious production values we can expect from the just-announced New Annotated Lovecraft edition — set to be published by W.W. Norton in 2015…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQEvx_Zd9n8&w=640&h=360]
How far Lovecraft’s work has come, from being published only ephemerally and on the cheapest woodpulp paper of the pulp magazines. Although I guess Norton will have to use the public domain texts, and not Joshi’s revised and corrected texts?
24 Tuesday Jan 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
A couple of new academic full-text works of interest, freely available online…
* Joakim Bengtsson. Tentative outline: the Ending and the Solution of Conflicts in [? name truncated, title not on document – probably “…the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft”]. 10,000 words, seems to be a Masters dissertation? Sweden, but in English. The author appears in the cast list for the Swedish Lovecraftian short movie “Fyren” (‘Keeper of the Light’, 2009).
* Johan Wijkmark. “One of the Most Intensely Exciting Secrets”: The Antarctic in American Literature, 1820-1849. Karlstad University, 2009. Seems to be a PhD thesis, prettified as a monograph by the university press. In English.
24 Tuesday Jan 2012
Posted in New books
A Sherlock Holmes specialist named Leslie S. Klinger has reportedly announced he is working on a New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft volume, for mainstream publisher W.W. Norton, due out in 2015. He’s a U.S. lawyer who has previously crafted The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: Vols. 1 & 2, The Short Stories, and Vol. 3, The Novels (2004), and The New Annotated Dracula (2008), both published in sumptious-but-affordable doorstopper editions by W.W. Norton. I’m a fan and not a scholar of the Holmes stories, and I have little interest in vampires, so I have to say that Klinger is a name that has passed me by until now. I haven’t delved into it very deeply, but there appears to be some controversy around his annotated volumes. Wilum Pugmire reports on Facebook that… “S.T. [Joshi] figures that most of the annotations in the [Klinger] Lovecraft volume will be culled from his own commentary”.
23 Monday Jan 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
Congratulations to the excellent Monster Brains blog. In a world where most blogs start hopefully but barely last six weeks, it’s now been running for six years.
23 Monday Jan 2012
Posted in Odd scratchings
An interesting divination of the aether by a savvy publisher’s editor…
“Catherine Burke, the editorial director of Sphere, said there was a “surge of interest from readers” in ghost stories, and agents were receiving more submissions in the genre. With high-profile releases expected to be popular this year, she predicts we will see even more ghost stories in 2013.”
It doesn’t necessarily have to be nostalgic “men in frock-coats chasing white sheets in English country churchyards”, although we may get some of that from TV producers.
Perhaps fiction has already done this (*) but one of the interesting things about recent Doctor Who is how the writers and monster concept artists have pointed out how to very effectively ‘re-invent the ghost’ (e.g. The Silence, numerous SF-y ‘haunted’ houses with haunted rooms) while keeping it roughly within a sort-of scientific framework. It’s an interesting and popular hybridity between horror and SF, of the sort that Lovecraft might have appreciated.
(Incidentally, it’s such a pity that the most recent Doctor Who series made such a dog’s dinner of the central ‘Silence’ plotline. Someone really needs to make a four-hour fan-edit of that series that just focuses on the central/core storyline).
(*) I’m really not well-read in modern horror, preferring SF, although I’m slowly noting the anthologies that need to be read…
22 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in Historical context
A complete new scan of a cartoon guide book to New York City in the late 1930s, more than a decade after Lovecraft departed the city, but with the city still much the same as the one Lovecraft would have experienced…
22 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
What if… Lovecraft had developed a recognisable continuing character? Here’s John Spelling‘s delicious take on the idea of remixing The Shadow with Lovecraft…
21 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The online Museum of Fantastic Specimens (in Japanese, but Google Chrome should automatically translate the page from Japanese to English). The Tokyo Drift Museum of the South Seas gallery is a special treat, although all the pictures are relatively small…
[ Hat-tip: Propnomicon ]
21 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books
Monster Brains unearths an online copy of Edward William Cooke’s Grotesque Animals (1872).
21 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in New books
The Wall Street Journal Bookshelf’s Tom Shippey reviews As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford Uni Press, 2012)…
“Mr. Saler counterpunches vigorously against the whole edifice of literary snobbery [against SF, fantasy and the weird]. What he has to say is so self-evidently right that the fact he has to say it makes one wonder how the critical profession has managed, for so long, to cultivate such a large blind spot. His book should be essential reading in every graduate school of the humanities. But it’s much more fun than that recommendation suggests.”
20 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in Odd scratchings
A London bookseller appears to have a set of first edition Selected Letters available, complete with the expanded second edition of the Index, for £300.
20 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in Unnamable
Missing the dust-jacket to your Arkham Press rarity? Facsimile Dust Jackets claims to be able to supply you with the requisite wrapper for H.P. Lovecraft titles…
Or you could just frame them?