Category Archives: New books

Forthcoming McFarland books

10 Monday Oct 2022

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Why do publishers make it so difficult to find out about forthcoming books? For instance, the McFarland website has no way to search by all books + latest, by date. But after some naughty URL-hacking by me, they do now. Though even then you still have to manually open the book blurb fold-away section for each and every page. And then another section to get the publication date. Sigh. Oh, for a unified all-publishers news-feed for all forthcoming non-fiction books in English. Hint: it’s definitely not Amazon, which is rubbish at that and also clogged up with shovelware and ‘blank notepads’ junk.

Anyway, some possible forthcoming or just-out McFarland titles of interest to Tentaclii readers. As always with McFarland, some will be gems, some clunkers…

Ancient Stone Sites of New England and the Debate Over Early European Exploration (2nd Edition)

Reading the Great American Zombie: The Living Dead in Literature

The Dark Side of G.K. Chesterton (“explores the darker fringes of his wild imagination”)

Music and the Paranormal: An Encyclopedic Dictionary

Fantastic Serial Sites of California: Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Locations, 1919–1955 (screen filming locations)

How to Misunderstand Tolkien: The Critics and the Fantasy Master

Beowulf in Comic Books and Graphic Novels

The Writer and the Cross: Interviews with Authors of Christian Historical Fiction

The Knights Templar in Popular Culture

New book: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain

22 Thursday Sep 2022

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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An open-access review of Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain. “Modern” here meaning early modernity, from the 1870s through to the 1930s…

On the whole we cannot see the turn to psychical research as a momentary lapse of reason on the part of late Victorian physicists. [And] we should not be embarrassed or surprised by the interest that leading physicists had in the occult.

Studi Lovecraftiani No. 21

21 Wednesday Sep 2022

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A new issue of the Italian language Lovecraft journal Studi Lovecraftiani No. 21 (Autumn 2022) is now available. Contents in Italian include…

* A long and detailed article titled “Collecting Lovecraft”, a guide for connoisseurs and collectors looking for the rarest and most sought-after editions, as well as those more difficult to find.

* An articulate essay on the role played by music in HPL’s works.

* An essay on the pseudobiblia of Sutter Cane. [Cane being the fictional novelist in John Carpenter’s movie In The Mouth of Madness.]

* An in-depth study of Jean Robin’s book, H.P. Lovecraft et le secret des adorateurs du Serpent (2017). [Robin appears to be a stylish writer who is well known in French occult circles, in the tradition of Rene Guenon. Title translates as ‘H.P. Lovecraft and the Secret of the Serpent Worshipers’, which appears to claim to be non-fiction.]

* The second and last part of an essay on the “abstraction of corporeality” in the fiction of HPL.

* Unpublished works by the master, newly in Italian. Notes on “Medusa’s Coil” with Zelia Bishop, and the poem [known in Italian as] “A Pan”.

* A detailed review of Joshi’s HPL biography I Am Providence, recently available in Italian.

* News of the latest releases at the international level.

* Two new Lovecraftian stories by contemporary writers.

Cover art by Pietro Rotelli.

New Book: ‘Eyes of the God’, second expanded edition

16 Friday Sep 2022

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Now listing, the revised and expanded Eyes of the God: Selected Writings of R. H. Barlow. It’s gone from a slim 209 pages to a shelf-trembling 596 pages.

Also, the third issue of S.T. Joshi’s megajournal Penumbra is now listing on Hippocampus with table-of-contents. Among others…

“A Baconian Reading of the Weird Tale from Shelley to Lovecraft”.

““I Dream a Golden Dream”: A Brief Dunsany Correspondence — and Friendship”.

“Under the Sign of the Hourglass: Elderly Protagonists in Horror Fiction”.

“Searching for God in the Dark Seas of William Hope Hodgson’s Poetry”.

The blurb also mentions an essay on “H P. Lovecraft’s influence on George R.R. Martin”, though I don’t see it in the TOCs.

Plus my bit of initial archaeological probing on Mary Howitt, to establish the weird outlines of her vast output and save someone a few weeks of work in the future. It won’t be me, as it needs abundant time and travel expenses to visit multiple archives for weeks at a time. If you can get a chunky grant for that, feel free.

Linus, September 2022

14 Wednesday Sep 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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News from Italy. A chunky new issue of Linus magazine devotes itself to H.P. Lovecraft, with a wide range of articles, art, and comics. It’s in Italian, and is available now.

Includes the following interesting titles, in translation, among others:

Monsters at the corner of the street.
Fantastic narratives.
Between absolute materialism and poetry.
The Call of Cthulhu.
On the rays of the moon.
Alan Moore and the call of Lovecraft.
The challenge to represent the Unspeakable.
Adriano Monti-Buzzetti interviews Gou Tanabe.
Dagon – the inhabitant of the dark.

New Book: A Russian ‘I Am Providence’ translation

12 Monday Sep 2022

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among other news…

I can report the arrival of the new issue of the Lovecraft Annual, an issue of unusual interest and substance, containing no fewer than three separate articles about Lovecraft’s relations with C.M. Eddy, Jr., among many other subjects.

Great. Well, one of those is mine, so it’ll be interesting to read the other two.

Also noted is…

a Russian translation of I Am Providence, published by a Moscow firm called Eksmo […] a 794-page hardcover

He can’t find the Web page, and nor can I. However, this appears to be a picture of Vol. 1, as trailed back in May 2022. Seems to be following the two volume format of the English edition.

Joshi becomes “C.T. Axown”!

New book: Radio Psychics

12 Monday Sep 2022

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Possibly of interest to those looking into the historical context for Lovecraft’s “Nyarlathotep” (1920), a new McFarland book Radio Psychics: Mind Reading and Fortune Telling in American Broadcasting, 1920–1940. Apparently not well written, according to one review. But it seems snappy enough in the Google Books excerpts I can obtain, and looks well researched.

April 1919 was when “the restrictions were lifted” on U.S. commercial radio, and it then seems to have been something of a free-for-all? The book also notes early phonograph records in the hypnosis line…

Fitzgibbons had been the first to think of making a “hypnotic record” one could play on one’s phonograph, in order to induce hypnosis (“‘Hypnotic Record’ Brings Out One’s Latent Genius”, Talking Machine World 15.6 (15th June 1919)

News from France

01 Thursday Sep 2022

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My thanks to Gregory for letting me know that the French magazine Actuality: The Universe of Books has a new article “Lovecraft, Cthulhu and the Old Ones enter the Pleiades”. Here “Pleiades” is a play on the name of the famous French publishing house, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade. Who have now revealed (I translate)…

We are currently preparing an edition of the works of H.P. Lovecraft”, confirms La Pleiade. … “The work is in progress”.

This is not to be confused with the sumptious Mnemos multi-volume edition of Lovecraft now emerging…

Mnemos will soon publish the 4th volume of a gigantic translation, at the end of September [2022] … accompanied by the required scholarly apparatus.

The final third of the article turns into a short interview with the main translator for Mnemos, David Pathe-Camus…

I challenge you to read a text such as “Nyarlathotep” and not think about our own time. It reads like it was written just for us. Lovecraft had a keen awareness of the human condition. [In a way, his work] foreshadows the currents that will come after it — such as existentialism or the absurd.

The same article also notes A Bestiary of the Twilight (Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule, June 2022), a French ‘BD’ (i.e. oversized graphic novel, often in hardcover) which…

takes HPL as the main character

Update: Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule has been re-titled as The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence for the English edition, and since summer 2022 can now be enjoyed by English readers.

New book: Copiously annotated and corrected edition of “With The Night Mail”

28 Sunday Aug 2022

Posted by in Kipling, New books, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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Newly published, my labour-of-love “With the Night Mail”, annotated edition. Available now as a .PDF file. $2 on Gumroad, but the first 30 Tentaclii readers can get it free by using coupon-code tentaclii at the checkout. Or if you’ve feeling generous, you can pay the $2 and skip the coupon. I’m hoping that this Gumroad ‘formula’ may eventually start to produce a much-needed bit of extra income.

Blurb:

This is the best version of Kipling’s famous “With The Night Mail” (1905), the first ‘hard’ science-fiction story. Still a fabulous steampunk read, today.

Here newly and fully annotated with 4,600 words of precise scholarly annotations. Several important new discoveries are made, including the identity of “little Ada” — she was a real pilot! All four earliest versions have been checked and cross-referenced, and the modern corrupted text has been carefully cleaned. Differences between editions are noted in the footnotes.

There are 145 footnotes, explaining the technology, lingo, and places. One footnote even discovers a long ‘new’ section of dialogue about the risk of plague, unseen since the first publications in 1905 — and never reprinted until now!

This .PDF is thus as close as we will get to a definitive version of the seminal story that launched the entire genre of hard science-fiction, and which opened the highly influential Gollancz yellow-jacket survey anthology One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (1969).

As a bonus, there are four new full-page colour illustrations including one of “George”. This labour-of-love e-book is 28 pages in total, delivered to you as a .PDF file. It may interest RPG gamers, as well as scholars and readers.

As you can tell, I’ve at last been able to see all four of the earliest editions. And my gosh… many differences! And with errors in places, in some modern editions, even including a handful in the free version on the site of The Kipling Society. Anyway, regular Tentaclii readers know my approach… copious attention to detail, deep historical research, resulting in many fascinating footnotes. Enjoy.