Monthly Archives: January 2012

Three Messages and a Warning – new Mexican anthology

20 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by in New books

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Launching on 26th Jan in Texas at the Creativity and the Brain conference, a new doorstopper 300-page anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic. It’s from Small Beer Press, and the book is in English…

“Thirty four all-original Mexican science fiction and fantasy features ghost stories, supernatural folktales, alien incursions, and apocalyptic narratives, as well as science-based chronicles of highly unusual mental states in which the borders of fantasy and reality reach unprecedented levels of ambiguity. Introduction by Bruce Sterling.”

Here’s Alberto Chimal reading his story from the anthology, “Variation on a Theme of Coleridge”…

[vimeo 34914275]

Amazon USA currently has the paper version available for pre-order at an enticing $10 with free shipping, for those who own surgical wrist supports. No news of any lighter-weight Kindle edition, although there will be a $10 PDF edition for tablet PC users.

Frankenstein’s Moon

19 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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Given Lovecraft’s interest in astronomy, and his use of it in fiction, this new 28 minute BBC Radio 4 documentary might interest — Frankenstein’s Moon (“Listen Again” online in the UK)…

“Did the Moon shining into Mary Shelley’s bedroom in June 1816 play a part in the genesis of her Frankenstein story? Adam Rutherford explores this and other influences cast by astronomical phenomena on the work of writers and artists, such as Galileo’s painter friend Ludovico Cigoli, Arthur Conan Doyle, and modern Sherlock creator Mark Gatiss.”

Intersectionality and Lovecraft

19 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Unnamable

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Roundtable: Intersectionality and Lovecraft, from a 12th Jan Locus Online roundtable. “Intersectionality” is a feminist theory term that suggests one’s different social and cultural identities — being a woman, being lesbian, being black, being disabled, being a daughter — interact in society to form more intractable tangles of discrimination. It has since been ported more generally into a variety of leftist academic approaches such as sociology and cultural studies, where it knocks around with subtler theories of hybridity, ‘fluid identity’ versions of queer, and various ideas on how online identities are lived out.

More recent academic work

17 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Scholarly works

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A couple of interesting academic works in open PDF form, from 2011…

The Indigenous Gothic Novel: tribal twists, native monsters, and the politics of appropriation, by Amy Elizabeth Gore. M.A. dissertation, 2011.

“Bibliographica Necronomica : selections from the literature of grimoires, cursed books and unholy bindings” by Kurt X. Metzmeier. Newsletter of Legal History & Rare Books (Special Interest Section, American Association of Law Libraries), Volume 17 Number 2, Fall 2011.

Doctor Fate

15 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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A long tribute to the Doctor Fate title from the Golden Age era of comic books (it’s the DC equivalent of Marvel’s Doctor Strange title)…

“For the first 135 pages, Doctor Fate Archives [printed volume collects More Fun Comics #55-98] features some of the wildest, eeriest and most entertaining stuff the era has to offer as far as mainstream comics go. […] While Doctor Fate is generally characterized as a sorcerer hero in modern comics, he’s actually presented here as a scientist who has discovered a way to manipulate his atomic structure and the atomic structure of other things as well, thus making it appear that he can do magic. The man who gives Fate his powers is not a sorcerer, but an alien who was worshipped as a god (just like Lovecraft’s great old ones). Fate even denies the existence of vampires and werewolves in one story, just as how Lovecraft often showed contempt for such “traditional” horrors and hardly ever used them. We also have a “witch haunted Salem”, characters who speak in odd, stilted dialogue with truly bizarre tense, hidden races, abandoned megaliths, as well as half man and half fish creatures that clearly were inspired by Lovecraft’s Deep Ones. Doctor Fate may well be the first Lovecraft pastiche in mainstream entertainment.” [my emphasis]

The Revised Adolphe Danziger de Castro

14 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Chris Powell’s “The Revised Adolphe Danziger de Castro“, free…

“The following article was published in the Spring 1997 (Number 36) edition of Lovecraft Studies, a small, academic journal for devotees of H.P. Lovecraft and fiction of the weird. It describes a phase of Danziger’s writing career where he used ghostwriters to revise and improve his writing. Most notable among those ghostwriters was horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.”

JURN

12 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Independent scholars seeking free access to full-text articles in academic journals may be interested in my JURN search-engine. Built over three years, JURN now indexes and searches 4,336 free ejournals in the arts & humanities. These are a mix of full “open access” journals, and serious publications that simply put some or all of their content online for free.

I also have a JURN Directory, an organised single-page display of 3,000 links to all the English-language titles indexed in JURN.

Both resources are kept free of link-rot via regular automated checks.