25 Saturday Aug 2018
Posted in New books
Interested in knowing who H.G. Wells modelled his Time Traveller character on? All is revealed in my 2017 book H. G. Wells in the Potteries: North Staffordshire and the genesis of The Time Machine.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bbBkRiHWUQ?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
25 Saturday Aug 2018
Posted in New books
The 800-page Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith is out, albeit at first only in a limited-edition hardback. Apparently released summer 2017, though Amazon UK knows nothing of it.
Other volumes in recent years are: Letters to C. L. Moore and Others (2017); Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, Duane W. Rimel, and Nils Frome (2016); Letters to J. Vernon Shea, Carl F. Strauch, and Lee McBride White (2016); Letters to Robert Bloch and Others (2015); and Letters to Elizabeth Toldridge and Anne Tillery Renshaw (2014). Paperback only, as yet.
25 Saturday Aug 2018
Posted in New books
Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue is now in its fourth edition, revised and enlarged. It slipped out just before Christmas 2017. Paperback only, and as yet there’s no Kindle edition.
A similar volume for Tolkien is also in preparation, the Tolkien scholars having previously lacked such a volume.
25 Saturday Aug 2018
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Contents have been announced for the Lovecraft Annual No. 12, 2018. The journal is set to ship this month. No pre-order on Amazon, as yet.
The Melancholia of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann”.
James Goho
Feminine Powerlessness and Deference in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Cecelia Hopkins-Drewer
Ravening for Delight: Unusual Descriptions in Lovecraft.
Duncan Norris
Where Lovecraft Lost His Telescope: His Kingston and the Towns around It.
Robert H. Waugh
Why Michel Houellebecq Is Wrong about Lovecraft’s Racism.
S. T. Joshi
“Whaddya Make Them Eyes at Me For?”: Lovecraft and Book Publishers.
David E. Schultz
Two Centenaries: H. P. Lovecraft and Elsa Gidlow.
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.
2001: A Lovecraftian Odyssey.
Michael D. Miller
That Fool Olson.
Bobby Derie
A Placid Island: H. P. Lovecraft’s “Ibid”.
Francesco Borri
Lovecraft, Aristeas, Dunsany, and the Dream Journey.
Darrell Schweitzer
H. P. Lovecraft — Beacon and Gateway.
Donald Sidney-Fryer
The Void: A Lovecraftian Analysis.
Duncan Norris
Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Romantic on the Nightside.
Jan B. W. Pedersen
How to Read Lovecraft: A Column by Steven J. Mariconda.
Reviews. [titles unstated]
Briefly Noted.
25 Saturday Aug 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc.
I’m pleased to see that some previously unavailable collaborations and ghostwritten stories by H.P. Lovecraft are now available in audiobook. H. P. Lovecraft – The Complete Fiction Omnibus Collection – Collaborations and Ghostwriting (April 2018).
The reader John Finn sounds fine, judging by YouTube clips. He’s not the gravelly Wayne June, but he still has a very suitable voice for the task. If you want an extended audition, he has a free five-hour extract from his Complete Conan readings (though the three Trantor ‘complete Conan’ recordings are well worth paying more for: start with their The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, then Bloody Crown, then Conquering Sword).
For everything Lovecraft that’s worth having in audio, as of today you’d want this new ‘collaborations and ghostwriting’ collection, plus…
* all of Wayne June’s excellent and definitive readings of the main Lovecraft. Usually branded as ‘The Dark Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft’, not all of which are available on Audible in the UK. (The early ones are on YouTube, albeit only in MP3 audio quality: Vol. 1; Vol. 2; and Vol. 3).
* The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft for $20 on a USB-stick from The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. For the minor and other items that Wayne June hasn’t read. A recording of Supernatural Horror in Literature is apparently also available to bona fide purchasers, as a free download.
* the audio for Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany, again for the minor items not covered by either Wayne June or the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society (includes some dire juvenilia and does not include the essay “Lovecraft in Britain”, the latter being in the print version only);
* and the new reading of Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems to top it off.
Eventually someone will also add readings of the best of the essays, journalism and travel writing. It would be ridiculous to try a single selection of ‘the best of the letters’, even in a 48 hour reading. But one might produce some topographical place-based audiobooks by using descriptive sections from letters (‘Old Providence and its Cats’; ‘Lovecraft’s childhood in Providence’; ‘Exploring the graveyards, slums and marshland of New York City’; ‘Visions of Salem and Marblehead’ etc). Perhaps also one on his ‘Small Pleasures’, to feature an alternating mix of the whimsical and the macabre — cats, caves, candy and ice-cream parlors, used book stores, roller-coasters and fun-fairs, star-gazing, walking canes, conversation, extreme heat, ancient rooftops, bright lads, fountain pens, coffee, hoary old graveyards. Apparently the venerable S.T. Joshi is already planning the H. P. Lovecraft Cat Book which may be some kind of cat anthology. Though that’s unlikely to be an audiobook unless it becomes an unexpected bestseller.
As for Collaborations and Ghostwriting, in the UK £24 gets you 29 stories in 26 hours. Sadly there’s no contents list even in the Kindle ebook preview sample, but I think I know why that is and if so then it’s a valid reason.
Be aware that, as with the earlier Eldritch Tales collection, there are some real turkeys here (no, that’s not the reason why I think there’s no contents list). Stories done by Lovecraft when he was age 10, or as a quick favour or teaching-aid for friends, and never meant for publication under his name. The best are done as a ghost-writer, often in exchange for typing services (he hated typing, but the pulp magazines demanded double-spaced typing for submissions) or as a genuine collaboration. Yet there are also some really excellent stories such as the almost novel-length The Mound, almost as good as his main solo stories, and these have been previously unavailable in audio from a suitable reader.
25 Saturday Aug 2018
Posted in New books
Newly published for his 60th birthday, the memoirs of S.T. Joshi, one of the great scholars of the weird and supernatural in fiction. There’s also a Kindle ebook edition for £4.30.
“What Is Anything? speaks with disarming frankness” says the blurb — as only S.T. can. Those who know his blog will be expecting at least a dozen tasty feasts of toasted university academics.
14 Friday Aug 2015
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales book of essays is now slated as due in hardback in October 2015. The R.E. Howard blog Two-Gun Raconteur has an interview with co-editor Jeffrey Shanks.
CONTENTS:
Introduction: Weird Tales — Discourse Community and Genre Nexus
PART I: THE UNIQUE MAGAZINE: WEIRD TALES, MODERNISM, AND GENRE FORMATION
Chapter 1: “Something that swayed as if in unison”: The Artistic Authenticity of Weird Tales in the Interwar Periodical Culture of Modernism – Jason Ray Carney
Chapter 2: Weird Modernism: Literary Modernism in the First Decade of Weird Tales – Jonas Prida
Chapter 3: “Against the Complacency of an Orthodox Sun-Dweller”: The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class” – Daniel Nyikos
Chapter 4: Strange Collaborations: Shared Authorship and Weird Tales – Nicole Emmelhainz
Chapter 5: Gothic to Cosmic: Sword and Sorcery Fiction in Weird Tales – Morgan Holmes
II. EICH-PI-EL AND TWO-GUN BOB: LOVECRAFT AND HOWARD IN WEIRD TALES
Chapter 6: A Nameless Horror: Madness and Metamorphosis in H.P. Lovecraft and Post-modernism – Clancy Smith
Chapter 7: Great Phallic Monoliths: Lovecraft and Sexuality – Bobby Derie
Chapter 8: Evolutionary Otherness: Anthropological Anxiety in Robert E. Howard’s “Worms of the Earth” – Jeffrey Shanks
Chapter 9: Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard – Justin Everett
III. MASTERS OF THE WEIRD: OTHER AUTHORS OF WEIRD TALES
Chapter 10: Pegasus Unbridled: Clark Ashton Smith and the Ghettoization of the Fantastic – Scott Connors
Chapter 11: “A Round Cipher”: Word-Building and World-Building in the Weird Works of Clark Ashton Smith – Geoffrey Reiter
Chapter 12: C. L. Moore and M. Brundage: Competing Femininities in the October, 1934 Issue of Weird Tales – Jonathan Helland
Chapter 13: Psycho-ology 101: Incipient Madness in the Weird Tales of Robert Bloch – Paul Shovlin
Chapter 14: “To Hell and Gone”: Harold Lawlor’s Self-Effacing Pulp Metafiction – Sidney Sondergard
09 Sunday Aug 2015
Posted in Historical context, New books, New discoveries, Scholarly works
Forthcoming in mid/late August, a new H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society book The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop. Nice to see that it’s both illustrated and rather affordable. The letters are new and previously unpublished…
“In 2014 a collection of [36, 1927 to 1936] letters from H.P. Lovecraft to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop was discovered in an old trunk in a basement.”
These new discoveries have been woven into the “eighteen previously known letters”, and the whole has been annotated.
[ Hat-tip: Ken Faig ]
07 Friday Aug 2015
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
Goldsmiths, the famous London art and design school, is set to launch an ‘inventive’ University press under open access, later in 2015…
Goldsmiths, University of London is preparing to launch Goldsmiths Press, a new university press built on digital-first publishing, and interested in unconventional projects traditionally excluded by publishers. … We have a particular interest in projects that are ordinarily overlooked or excluded by traditional academic publishers … also interested in non-standard modes and forms of communication, such as an article in the form of a comic or graphic novel…”
Possibly the sort of place that a proposed Lovecraft-infused sci-art book on Tentacular Interactivities in an Internet of Hypercomputing Slime-molds, etc, might find a home. 🙂
05 Wednesday Aug 2015
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Shipping now, the new book Fifteen Years of Hippocampus Press: 2000-2015.
Picture: A peek into Hippocampus’s hardback of Joshi’s I Am Providence. Photo by Will Hart.
On new Hippocampus books, S.T. Joshi’s blog recently reported that he is making progress on new (revised?) e-book versions for his…
“H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (Starmont House, 1990), A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft (Starmont House, 1996)”
He also writes…
“we are also planning ebooks of such things as Donald R. Burleson’s H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Greenwood Press, 1983), Peter Cannon’s H.P. Lovecraft (Twayne, 1989), and perhaps other titles.”
01 Saturday Aug 2015
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
More new scholarly print books from Hippocampus Press…
Donald R. Burleson’s Lovecraft: An American Allegory is a new book collection of his essays from the past 40 or so years. It appears to be shipping now.
* Darkness and Light: Lovecraft’s Impact on My Life
* Thematic Studies
Zen and the Art of Lovecraft
A Note on Lovecraft, Mathematics, and the Outer Spheres
Lovecraft and Chiasmus, Chiasmus and Lovecraft
Lovecraft and the World as Cryptogram
Lovecraft and the Death of Tragedy
Lovecraft and Romanticism
Lovecraft: An American Allegory
Lovecraft and Adjectivitis: A Deconstructionist View
Lovecraft and Chaos
Lovecraft and Interstitiality
Lovecraft and Gender
H.P. Lovecraft: Textual Keys
* Sources and Influences
H.P. Lovecraft: The Hawthorne Influence
Strange High Houses: Lovecraft and Melville
Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft
A Note on Lovecraft and Rupert Brooke
* Studies of Individual Tales
Iranon and Kuranes: An Intertextual Gloss
On Lovecraft’s Fragment “Azathoth”
Aporia and Paradox in “The Outsider”
Is Lovecraft’s “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh . . .” a Cryptogram?
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Mythic Hero Archetype in “The Dunwich Horror”
Prismatic Heroes: The Colour out of Dunwich
Humour beneath Horror: Some Sources for “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Whisperer in Darkness”
The Thing: On the Doorstep
* Lovecraft’s Poetry
Lovecraft’s “The Unknown”: A Sort of Runic Rhyme
On Lovecraft’s “Nemesis”
On Lovecraft’s “The Ancient Track”
Scansion Problems in Lovecraft’s “Mirage”
Lovecraft’s Cheshire Cat
Lines of Verse Evoking Close Reading: Acrostics-Formulated Text
Also Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 1, a print collection of the papers read at NecronomiCon 2013, and is set for publication August 2015. I’m unsure if these are verbatim from the conference, or if some have been expanded.
19 Sunday Jul 2015
Posted in New books
A chunky new Hippocampus Press book of Lovecraft’s letters, now available for order and (it seems) shipping: H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Robert Bloch and Others.
Hippocampus Press also has a 20% preorder discount on S.T. Joshi’s forthcoming second edition of his survey of Mythos fiction, The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos.
