21 Monday Sep 2020
Posted in New books, Podcasts etc.
Mystery Of the Dark is doing Bengali translations/readings of Lovecraft, on YouTube. Bengali is the second most widely spoken language in India. I’ve no idea what the translation is like, but the reading seems clear and well-paced.
Also noted in translation, H.P. Lovecraft, Le Commonplace Book. An English/French annotated edition, currently available.
21 Monday Sep 2020
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
Hippocampus has announced and has a page for the new and greatly-expanded edition of H.P. Lovecraft: Letters To Rheinhart Kleiner and Others. The “and Others” section includes, among others, “a small batch of letters and postcards to Arthur Leeds”. Although these still fill 100 pages. In all, there are over 200 pages of additional annotated letters to correspondents other than Kleiner. I suspect most have been published before, but they won’t have been annotated before. Shipping in October, apparently.
From The Photodramatist, December 1921. Kleiner’s light poem on ‘seeing the world’ via cinema news-reel and travel-short, which only a century ago was a relatively new media form and a new audience experience for much of America. The poem is not listed in the first Letters To Rheinhart Kleiner.
18 Friday Sep 2020
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
An interesting item, new from Hippocampus. Robert E. Howard: A Closer Look, this being the old Starmont Reader’s Guide for Howard, but overhauled and updated for 2020. Done by the original authors too, which is nice…
“the authors have now prepared a radically expanded and updated version of their monograph, taking account of these new discoveries” [by Howard scholars]
The book is structured by character rather than by date, which makes sense for a Reader Guide. The book also surveys his poetry and other work. So it all looks very useful as an introductory guide. Amazon UK has no listing for it yet, but let’s hope it gets on there and perhaps also has a Kindle ebook edition in due course.
09 Wednesday Sep 2020
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
H.P. Lovecraft in Britain (2007), newly republished in summer 2020 as a budget Kindle ebook for £2.28. It’s paired with “The Horror in the Museum” for some reason, though it appears the latter is not annotated or also given an essay.
The long essay untangled Lovecraft’s British publishing history from the 1950s to the 70s, with the help of the Gollancz archives. It was originally published as a limited edition 46-page chapbook from The British Fantasy Society, with a pleasing cover and interior illustrations.
It looks like it may still be possible to get a copy of the original chapbook monograph from the author, for a mere £6 inc. UK postage. As such it may be rather more desirable than the new ebook for many Lovecraftians. Worth a try.
Also new, in a 300-page paperback, is Claudio Foti’s book in Italian on Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling. This was published at the end of June 2020, and has an essay on the pair, “together with all of Lovecraft’s letters to Kenneth J. Sterling” in translation. It looks like it may also have a translation of “Eryx”, and hints at possibly containing other Sterling story translations in Italian. Foci has been a Lovecraft Annual contributor (2017) and hopefully we’ll get an English translation of his essay in due course.
08 Tuesday Sep 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts, New books
There’s a new Italian graphic novel of Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”. It’s actually more a Euro-style ‘BD album’ in page-count and large 17″ x 24″ size. The book shipped in July 2020.
The artist is Stefano Cardoselli. The publisher also offer his “Herbert West” (March 2020) and his the Lovecraftian “The Inhabitant of The Lake” by Ramsey Campbell is due in December 2020. Could be an opportunity here for an Anglosphere publisher to translate and bundle all three.
There’s also yet another graphic novel of At The Mountains of Madness, from Adam Fyda. This appeared in July…
British illustrator Dave Shephard has also announced what appears to be a melding of “Dagon” and “The Call of Cthulhu”, which bills itself in the book’s title as a “graphic novel” — but in the blurb as an “illustrated adaptation”. Due Spring 2021.
Also in graphic novels, The View from the Junkyard recently found a neglected Lovecraftian gem in a graphic novel titled Weird Detective…
The story takes detective fiction and merges it sublimely with the Cthulhu Mythos in ways I’ve seen only in such great books as Shadows over Baker Street; a collection of short stories pitting the Great Detective [Holmes] against the Great Old Ones. Finding something similar in graphic novel format is a treat!
A character that looks like Lovecraft, and he has a talking cat. I like it already.
The View from the Junkyard‘s review also notes his disappointment in discovering that this graphic novel was a trade from 2017 (per-issues 2016), and there have been no more in the years since. He wryly points to the huge difficulty involved in simply finding out about completed-story graphics novels of the pulp entertainment type, which get swamped by endless weekly tidal-waves of manga, superhero, and depressive art-school wrist-slashers…
I might need to hire a weird detective to help me find more like this.
Indeed. In the meantime Weird Detective is currently £9.99 for Kindle on Amazon UK, where for some reason it’s been saddled by Dark Horse with a retro Ditko-like cover that really doesn’t reflect the quality of Guiu Villanova’s interior artwork or layouts. It has about 110 pages of story.
03 Thursday Sep 2020
Posted in New books
Conan the Philosopher. Who knew?
“He had squatted for hours in the courtyard of the philosophers, listening to the arguments of theologians and teachers, and come away in a haze of bewilderment, sure of only one thing, and that, that they were all touched in the head.” — from “The Tower of the Elephant”.
01 Tuesday Sep 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
News of Lovecraft from Pegana Press, purveyors of hand-cranked letterpress perfection, Dark Dreamlands II…
Also several Clark Ashton Smith items, one now on pre-order, and…
Lost Tales vol. 5 containing more unpublished tales from Master Story Weaver, Lord Dunsany
31 Monday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
There’s a crowdfunder to publish a sumptuous illustrated edition of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” for Brazil. Apparently as yet unpublished in this translation…
“Lovecraft’s scariest tale in an unpublished version in Brazil, with art by [experienced comics artist] Salvador Sanz.”
It’s already 281% funded, and set to be published in a “widescreen” print edition…
I’m guessing the wide format would allow for English on one side, and Portuguese on the other, and on the same page.
29 Saturday Aug 2020
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
The Pulp Super-Fan considers what should be in the next Who’s Who in New Pulp. I was surprised to read that Cirsova wasn’t listed under magazines. I thought that Cirsova Magazine #1 (Spring 2019) was a key recent moment and exemplar for New Pulp (of the sort that attempts to emulate the old magazines)? But perhaps the Who’s Who compiler considers the title to be a book series? I’ll take a look when I get around to fully reading the Kindle ebook version. I featured Who’s Who in the latest Digital Art Live magazine, but it probably needs a full review here at some point, paired with some of the other new and older books on pulp writing.
I’d add another suggestion for a future edition: writers who state they are interested in: i) licencing their plots and characters for production by comics publishers; and ii) writers interested in considering a ‘proposal for collaboration’ with indie comics artists; with a pointer to iii) an appendix outlining a brief standardised ‘approach package’ that artists should send to writers, to aid in easy evaluation of the proposal.
25 Tuesday Aug 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Spanish, Italian and other languages are now starting to appear in the search-engine indexes covering the last five days. Here’s what I’ve picked up by search so far, to add to my previous coverage of Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday…
* New in Italian, and published on Lovecraft’s birthday, the book Chi ha paura di H.P. Lovecraft (Who’s Afraid of Lovecraft?, Oakmond, 290 pages)…
An articulate monograph full of ideas, De Sio’s work is framed by two experts in this area — Gianfranco de Turris and Sebastiano Fusco — who, in the extensive preface masterfully meld all the points covered by the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
Oakmond Publishing have a page for the book and it’s shipping now.
* Pietro Sabatelli usefully rounds up about 20+ Italian blog links offering posts for Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday. Scroll down to the foot of his post, and look under this banner…
* The day was chosen to launch the ‘Biblioteca Lovecraftiana Fundamental’ the term being used for a new door-stopper book. Contos Reunidos do Mestre do Horror Cósmico (Tales Gathered, by the Master of Cosmic Horror, Ex Machina, 540 pages). The publisher is in Brazil, so I assume Portuguese for this weighty…
anthology containing all 61 short stories written by Lovecraft and published in various magazines between 1917 and 1935.
23 Sunday Aug 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Now listed on Hippocampus as shipping, the scholarly journal Lovecraft Annual No. 14, 2020.
Looking down the contents list, the follow items especially appeal…
* Steven J. Mariconda’s “Atmosphere and the Qualitative Analysis of ‘The Colour out of Space'”, which must be the major essay which was known about but which did not appear in his recent book collection.
* Dylan Henderson’s “Missing the Punchline: The Subversive Nature of H. P. Lovecraft’s Occult Detective”, which must be on Malone in “Red Hook”.
* Ken Faig, Jr.’s “John Osborne Austin’s Seven Club Tales: Did They Inspire Lovecraft?”.
* Andrew Gipe-Lazarou’s “The ‘Extreme Fantasy’ of Delirious New York” sounds interesting, presumably a survey of Lovecraft’s responses to ‘faery’ New York before it curdled into being his ‘feary’ New York.
I see that Lovecraft Annual No. 13, 2019, can also be had at a discount.
21 Friday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
There will probably be more to come, but this is my round-up so far for 2020:
* The key website hplovecraft.com has… “completely overhauled and re-organized the “Lovecraft’s Letters” page” as a 130th birthday present. This being the page for the Lovecraft letters as published in book form.
* Portland’s H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival is celebrating Lovecraft’s 130th Birthday on the nearest weekend, via a “streaming event available to stream from anywhere in the U.S.”, and featuring “short films both new and classic from the festival’s 25 year history” and billed as “HPLFF Presents 130 Years of H.P. Lovecraft”. There is also a t-shirt for the event and the Festival’s co-director and “fellow Portland horror writers” ran an online Lovecraftian horror panel.
* The ‘Segundo Festival Literario H.P. Lovecraft’, aka ‘Literario 2do Festival H.P. Lovecraft’, appears to be taking place in Mexico from 20th-22nd August 2020, bringing together Lovecraftian artists, writers and film-makers in Mexico. Last year it was a physical event with stalls, talks and screenings at La Moderna. But this year it was perhaps only virtual. Online already is “Remanentes del pesimismo Schopenhaueriano en al obra de H.P. Lovecraft”, a 45 minute video lecture in Spanish on Schopenhauerian pessimism in Lovecraft. Doubtless more videos from the event will appear online soon.
* Elsewhere in Mexico there was a university event to launch the fourth edition of the La ciudad de las montañas de la locura (At The Mountains of Madness) and the blurb had it that… “there will be talks, short film screenings and will talk about art, science and cinema, all related to the writer.” The Casa Universitaria del Libro de la UANL also has livecasts via Facebook from August 17th to 22nd. “Among the themes will be addressed the relationship between Lovecraft and the First World War, his vision as a popularizer of science, the relationship between cinema and literature, and his poetry.”
* Also in Mexico, the 19th Macabre Film Festival at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico runs… “from August 25th to 30th, and will commemorate a hundred years of German Expressionism, and 130 years since the birth of H.P. Lovecraft”. The PDF Programme.
* Nothing from the Italian or other European Lovecraftians, that I can see. But possibly the search-engines have not yet got around to indexing the latest from across Europe. I get that impression from searches.
* I released my Annotated “Hypnos” at Tentaclii. This is the first substantial annotated edition, as Klinger omitted it from his two volumes, and the notes to be found from S.T. Joshi are fairly short.
* The latest Sept/Oct Halloween issue of Digital Production magazine, the substantial German trade magazine for high-end movie and TV digital FX and similar, was released on Lovecraft’s birthday with a ‘Cthulhu creation’ feature (article not yet online).
* There’s a “Cthulhu Mythos Sale” over on DriveThuRPG, which appears to be one of the largest of the RGP book sites. Tenkar’s Tavern has waded in and selected five of the best, and promises more picks soon.
* RPG gamers also chose the day to unleash Apocthulhu… “successfully launched the PDF edition of the APOCTHULHU Core Rulebook. It’s a 330 page behemoth packed with rules, world building resources, pre-defined settings…”.
* Comics artist Frank Brunner & Friends posted a nice arty ‘birthday-card’ on Facebook…
* A slightly less impressive Cthulhu Minecraft Skin was released. But fun, if you need a Cthulhu in there.
* Makowh released his full reading of “The Rats in the Walls”, accompanied by his own artwork which can be seen in crisper form at ArtStation.
* Harry Piper put together special 130th Birthday musings on “The Cosmic Pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft”.
* And lastly and rather more cheerily, the Journal of Geek Studies chose the day to celebrate Pokécrustacea: the crustacean-inspired Pokémon.