An item of news I missed in summer 2020, the release of a new issue of Studi Lovecraftiani, the leading Italian Lovecraft journal.
No. 18 has…
* Cover painting by Matteo Bocci.
* A homage to the writer and friend Elvezio Sciallis, a narrator and story writer.
* Renzo Giorgetti looks at the symbolic and mythological basis of R’lyeh.
* Fabio Calabrese proposes a “fourth genre” of the fantastic: Lovecraftian fiction. Thus widening the field of fantastic literature.
* Sandro Mezzetto on “some sources of Lovecraft’s fiction”.
* Christian Lamberti on the Randolph Carter cycle.
* Davide Rossato surveys John Carpenter’s Lovecraftian cinema.
* A translation of an early “evaluation” on Lovecraft by Joseph Payne Brennan, being one of the first items of literary criticism of the fiction
* A translation of “HPL and the myths of scientific materialism” by John A. Buettner.
* Lovecraft on Poe’s places… “a full-bodied unpublished work by Lovecraft himself, translated here for the first time, where the Dreamer talks to us about the homes and places of Poe.”
And there’s more. No. 17, too. Since somehow it appears that Tentaclii also missed Studi Lovecraftiani in June 2019. Following hot on the heels of a (perhaps late) January 2019 issue, which may be why I wasn’t looking for a summer issue in 2019.
No. 17 seems to have been about two-thirds a Ramsey Campbell / fiction / poetry issue by the look of it. But it also had unspecified… “essays and articles by Stefano Lazzarin, Renzo Giorgetti, Miranda Gurzo, Riccardo Rosati and others.”
A little further digging reveals some details on these items of non-fiction…
* Riccardo Rosati on HPL’s political thought, apparently comparing him with Evola.
* Stefano Lazzarin on ‘The Veiled Face: hyperbole and reticence in Howard Phillips Lovecraft’.
* Renzo Giorgetti on the importance of dreams as one of HPL’s sources of inspiration.
* Miranda Gurzo who sees “the mythology of Cthulhu as the symbol of the crisis of the modern world”, and suggests HPL’s possible sources in biblical Apocalypse imagery, re: The Book of Job.
* An examination of “Beyond The Wall Of Sleep”, which sounds like an English essay translated to Italian?
* A newly-translated 1937 poem by Lovecraft.