S. T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among the Lovecraft-related news in his latest long post, the Lovecraft Annual for 2019 is done and is thus presumably forthcoming later this summer, as are “volumes of Lovecraft’s letters to Donald Wandrei and Emil Petaja; to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. Sully”. Joshi now flies to France to participate in events there surrounding the publication of Je Suis Providence, the French-translation of his monumental H.P. Lovecraft biography.

No sign of a listing yet for the contents for the new Lovecraft Annual, but Hippocampus has H. P. Lovecraft: Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja listed at $25 after a small pre-publication discount. There’s also an explanatory note that this book has the same content as the older and now-expensive Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei (2005) but adds…

120 new pages of Lovecraft’s letters to Howard Wandrei and Emil Petaja. … In addition, a rare interview of Donald Wandrei is included, along with poems, essays, and stories by Petaja.

Dated by Amazon for a 1st June 2019 release, in a somewhat affordable £30 paperback, is The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation. Although the expensive hardback, aimed at university libraries, appeared back in 2017.

There are only two reviews I can find, the first being from John Tresch in the journal Poe Studies…

The book… “capitalizes on the Lovecraft revival to make clear the profound debts Lovecraft and his followers owed to Poe.” […] “it is the first to concentrate on the relation between these two enormously influential authors”. The book’s Introduction points out that… “Lovecraft became a conduit through which Poe passed into the modern genres of horror, science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction”.

“Slawomir Studniarz undertakes what he describes as a ‘new, unprejudiced look at Lovecraft’s poems’ and reveals their allegiance to Poe’s poetics” […] “Studniarz concludes that Lovecraft is a better, or at least a more Poe-like, poet than critics have realized.”

Michael Cisco shows that the comic horror of both authors derives from depicting… “the inability to distinguish between inner and outer, psychology and physics”. Yet the cosmic… “unholy, essentially unstable quasi-matters” are tackled empirically by… “detectives, scientists, and amateur scholars seeking explanations for troubling facts”.

“Dan Clinton’s outstanding essay “The Call of Ligeia” traces links between the cosmic vision of each author and the historically specific fields of science with which they engaged.”

“Ben Woodard’s essay “The Killing Crowd” connects Poe’s urban quasi-mystery “The Man of the Crowd” to Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook,” both of which offer lurid views of a city’s nightlife — London for Poe, and a hellish South Brooklyn for Lovecraft” [where these tales] “present the modern city as a medium, a site in which technologies of organization, knowledge, and visibility attempt to contain yet in fact expose and magnify ungovernable forms of monstrosity while burying the hidden truth of ‘deep crime’, the secret which in Poe’s tale cannot be read.”

The second review is from Travis Montgomery in the Edgar Allan Poe Review…

The book is… “an important step toward filling a critical gap”.

“In Chapter 4, Michael Cisco deems Kant, not Burke, the purveyor of the sublimity associated with the ‘cosmic horror’ that fascinated Poe and Lovecraft as storytellers, but the essay is thin on commentary that would help readers appreciate that Kantian influence.”

“Chapter 6 contains Waugh’s meandering yet intriguing interpretations of that [cat / staring eyes ] imagery. Especially fascinating is his suggestion that feline images in “The Black Cat” and “The Rats in the Walls” signal the narrators’ aristocratic aspirations, desires that underline class themes in the tales.”

[Despite some fuzziness and mis-steps] “Clinton’s investigation of the ways that Poe and his American successor ‘trace literary effects to enduring features of human perception’ is arresting in its originality”.

“Conspicuous [typo] errors appear in the text […] Such things should not surface in a book so expensive.”