14 Wednesday Sep 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Available now on Lulu, the 52-page catalogue for the Dead and Dreaming art show…
“This tome collects the work from the ‘Dead and Dreaming’ exhibition at Paradigm Gallery, Philadelphia [Fall 2011], showcasing twenty artists interpreting the work of H.P. Lovecraft.”
11 Sunday Sep 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Lovecraft e-zine issue 6, available now for Kindle or Nook ereaders.
10 Saturday Sep 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A preview of the children’s picture-book Where’s my Shoggoth? (Arteria, April 2012)…
04 Sunday Sep 2011
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
A little spin-off from my recent book on Lovecraft in New York, a new short book The Alphabet of Walking: a new anthology. Vivid and memorable passages on walking, from essays, letters and memoirs, mostly from the 18th & 19th centuries. 52 pages, 12,000 words. The full book can be had as a paperback at near cost-price, or for free in PDF form.
01 Thursday Sep 2011
Posted in Historical context, New books, New discoveries, Scholarly works
My new book is here! Walking With Cthulhu : H.P. Lovecraft as psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26. 55,000 words, 198 pages. Illustrated.
Another good haul of new discoveries! Including two new possible sources for Cthulhu. All heavily referenced and footnoted.
Buy a new paperback copy here! Kindle user? It’s also on the USA Kindle Store and the U.K. Kindle Store.
CONTENTS:
Timeline of Key Dates.
Introduction: A Walk in New York.
SURFACE: Walking the Streets of the City:
1. H.P. Lovecraft and the psychogeographers.
2. H.P. Lovecraft’s night walks in New York: psychogeographic techniques
3. The nature of the New York streets.
4. A note on H.P. Lovecraft and immigrants.
5. H.P. Lovecraft’s New York coffee houses and ice-cream parlours.
UNDERGROUND: On the Monstrous, Occult, and Hidden:
6. H.P. Lovecraft and the subway.
7. It emerged from the subways!
8. On mystical and occult New York.
9. On H.P. Lovecraft and Franz Boas
10. New York as R’lyeh, sunken city of Cthulhu.
“Nyarlathotep” annotated.
Bibliography.
Index.
24 Wednesday Aug 2011
The modern Weird Tales magazine has been sold by Wildside Press to a new owner/editor. Or at least, the rights to use the brand name for a magazine. The new owner is Marvin Kaye, whose first issue of the magazine will apparently be a Cthulhu special in Feb 2012. SF Scope writes of Kaye…
“The 73-year-old Kaye edited the anthology Weird Tales, The Magazine That Never Dies, which Doubleday published in 1988. He is the author of 16 novels and six nonfiction books, in addition to plays and play adaptations. He has edited at least 30 anthologies, and won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology in 2006 for The Fair Folk.”
23 Tuesday Aug 2011
Posted in New books
The Future Lovecraft doorstopper anthology is set and ready for 1st December 2011 (contents list). It’s apparently more ‘Nigerian post-apocalyptic sci-fi’ than ‘Captain Kirk Meets Cthulhu’. Markus Vogt’s “Dualism” graces the cover…
21 Sunday Aug 2011
Posted in Historical context, New books
Justin Woodman announces he’s working on a new book, to be titled Lovecraft’s Monsters: The Pulp Roots of the Paranormal…
“A preliminary outline has been drafted, with some initial work already started on the early chapters. More of this later as I present some of the ideas and source material relevant to book in forthcoming posts (which I hope to upload on a basis of around 2-3 weekly).”
Sounds like it might be about the historical way in which pulp horror skewed and influenced the conceptions of paranormal investigators from the 1920s onwards?
19 Friday Aug 2011
Posted in Historical context, New books
Silvia Moreno-Garcia today surveys the use of Lovecraft as a fictional character. I hadn’t spotted Peter Cannon’s The Lovecraft Chronicles book yet, so thanks to Silvia for that. It’s an alternate-history fictional biography, posing the question: “what if Lovecraft had lived?” According to S.T. Joshi’s review the book has him going to England, then (improbably, but no doubt colourfully) going off to fight for the left in the Spanish Civil War. I answered the same question myself a while back, as part of the 2011 Summer School. While I took him down a different fork there were a couple of overlaps with Cannon. I also had Lovecraft try to repurchase his birthplace in the 1960s with the money from movie rights, and not writing much fiction after the 1940s.
18 Thursday Aug 2011
Posted in New books
Lovecraft was a big fan of the The Arabian Nights in his youth, and he’d no doubt be pleased to hear the the foremost British writer on myth and fairytale has written a 500-page book about it. Independent scholar Marina Warner‘s Stranger Magic: Charmed States in the Wake of the Arabian Nights is due to be published by Chatto & Windus in the UK, and Random House in the USA. Seems they’re going to try and get it out for the New Year book token market.
“A dazzling history of magical thinking, exploring the power of The Arabian Nights and its impact in the West, and retelling some of its wondrous tales. […] Translated into French and English in the early days of the Enlightenment, this became a best-seller among intellectuals, when it was still thought of in the Arab world as a mere collection of folk tales. For thinkers of the West the book’s strangeness opened visions of transformation: dreams of flight, speaking objects, virtual money, and the power of the word to bring about change. Its tales create a poetic image of the impossible, a parable of secret knowledge and power. Above all they have the fascination of the strange — the belief that true knowledge lies elsewhere, in a mysterious realm of wonder. […] With startling originality and impeccable research, this ground-breaking book shows how magic, in the deepest sense, helped to create the modern world, and how profoundly it is still inscribed in the way we think today.”
Marina Warner can be heard discussing The Arabian Nights on BBC Radio 4’s highly recommended In Our Time programme (UK access only, those outside the UK try here).
17 Wednesday Aug 2011
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
The new Library of America e-Newsletter interviews
S.T. Joshi about Ambrose Bierce (PDF link, full interview).
17 Wednesday Aug 2011
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
The bull-o-meter nudges the top end of the scale in some of the opening publisher quotes in The Library Journal‘s new cover article on the fantasy/SF renaissance. But otherwise it’s an interesting survey of the ‘big publisher’ trends in the mad scramble from Sept to Xmas. The highlights…
* Gritty ‘dark fantasy’ infiltrates the sort of over-padded fantasy epics that you can stop a door with. But who wants to slog through a 3,000 page trilogy full of ‘grim’, in the current climate?
* A new trend for historical/fantasy desert settings, Arabian Nights style. Interesting. I could imagine a lot of Lovecraftian elements could creep in there, if done well. There’s certainly a lot of public domain material to mine for authentic descriptions and background.
* Growth “in the male urban fantasy market”. That sub-genre must have completely passed me by. Sounds like it’s a 20-something target market, for guys afraid their manhood will shrivel up and fall off if they read about faeries and elves?
* Authors who write about zombies are moving them into political satire and comedy. Best place for them. They’re such dull monsters, the only thing left to do is poke fun at them.
* Steampunk continues to flounder about looking for fresh settings and twists, judging from the article.
* New galactic-spanning space adventures have become very rare, as 50-something SF authors churn in a mire of near-future gloom and angst. Publishers will be republishing their old “upbeat” space epics, to compensate.
* There’s a gap in the market for smart optimistic young-adult hard SF, which will increase as the economic recovery starts.
The biggest news is probably that Neal Stephenson is back with a new novel, Reamde, in September. It’s another 1000-page doorstopper. I don’t mind the size and I really enjoyed Anathem — but it seems that Reamde is more like Cryptonomicon which while gripping was forgettable. No news of any new book from Stephen Baxter, sadly.