Lovecraft’s essays are now available in a new Spanish translation by Oscar Mariscal, as the book Confesiones de un incredulo: y otros ensayos escogidos (El Paseo, Oct 2018). The publisher’s blurb states that the works have previously been untranslated in Spanish, and also hints that the Letters were drawn on for their essay-like material. The translator’s selection is followed by a tabulation of the stories that Lovecraft noted or remarked on in his works and letters. Amazon Spain suggests the book has 300 pages, but the publisher suggests 240 pages.

Oh gawd, yet another themed Mythos anthology. This time, Cthulhu visits New Zealand. Thankfully for New Zealand’s forests he only does so for 200 pages, not the usual 600 pages. Even so… who reads these things, other than the authors and their buddies and the occasional obliged reviewer?

Coming soon… bumping along the bottom with “Lustcraftian Horrors: Erotic Stories Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft”. Seriously — the call for that anthology is out now.

Personally, hem hem, I’m hoarding my story-plots and awaiting the “H.P. Hovercraft vs. H.P Lovercat” anthology, devoted to Mythos stories set on a fleet of 1970s British hovercraft, which do battle in the middle of the English Channel with a giant tom-cat which displays amorous intentions toward dear old Blighty.

The first such book in English, Saif Eqbal’s Adventure comics and youth cultures in India, offers “a history and ethnography of adventure comic books for young people in India” with a strong focus on home-grown superheroes, detectives and some outright space sci-fi heroes (although I hear that hard space sci-fi is not very popular in India, as the mass markets are culturally attuned to fantasy). Routledge has managed to lumber the book with a very offputting cover, which must have taken them all of five minutes to slap together.

But the Contents suggest a useful brisk overview…

1. Action India
2. The Making of Modern Mythologies
3. The Golden Age of the Indian Superhero
4. Gendering Graphics
5. A Haven of Super Creativity
6. The Fantastic Familiar
7. The State of the Nation
8. A Forensics of Evil
9. Readers’ Worlds
10. In One of my Dreams, I Defeated America
11. Future Presents.
Glossary of Key Indian Adventure Comic Book Characters.
Index

For a historical take that stretches back further, there are essays on Indian genre in the first third of the recent summer 2018 collection Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories. Again, it’s billed as as a first, “the first substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages”. Though there was the 2008 article “Indian pulp fiction in English: A preliminary overview from Dutt to Dé” which starts in the 19th century. That article is paywalled but there’s a very long summary here with lots of name-checks.

I’m not sure how well Lovecraft fits into this cultural nexus, and a few minutes of searching for variants on India translations Lovecraft had no results. But Routledge’s Genre Fiction of New India: post-millennial receptions of “weird” narratives (2016) covers the scene in the post-2000 period. Apparently ‘the weird’ is quite commercially successful.

Just arrived on the Amazon Kindle, Famous Someday, a collection of biographical R. E. Howard articles originally published in The Cimmerian. The articles arose from trying to track down people in Cross Plains who might have known Howard, back in the day. And finding them, it seems. The book has illustrations in colour, and some extras.

Edizioni Bietti has produced a new Italian edition of Lovecraft’s own writings on Teoria dell’orrore [The Theory of Horror], in 580 pages…

“it is not a mere reprint, but a new edition — updated in the introduction, in the notes and in the numerous bibliographies that accompany it. The aim of the book is to offer Italian readers a theoretical framework as complete as possible”.

Given the size of the book, I’m guessing it also includes relevant extracts from the letters, thematically arranged?