The S.T. Joshi-edited collected Autobiographical Writings by Arthur Machen appears to be ordering, for November shipping.
New book: Autobiographical Writings by Arthur Machen
18 Sunday Oct 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Category Archives: Scholarly works
It’s cultifectious…
15 Thursday Oct 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
A new book, seemingly coming from an occultist perspective, Dark Magic: H.P. Lovecraft, Starry Wisdom and the Contagion of Fear…
explores the contagious qualities of Lovecraft’s tales, with their embedded sense of dread and their dismantling of human reason, and how they have propagated in the near century after his death … the infectious qualities of Lovecraft’s ideas are seen to parallel virology, mass infection, and the fraying state of the human psyche during times of pandemic.
Which blurb leads me to coin the new word “cultifectious”:— the quality had by a certain type of culture that is highly infectious and communicable, but not mere mass-market pop-fluff or some passing propaganda of-the-moment. It carries within it a complex nexus of elements that organically connect things usually divided — low and high culture, the deep past and the cosmic future, or ancient and modern science. Its infectiousness thus comes partly from being connected to ‘the genuine’ at both ends of one of those divisions, and by bringing these lightly into play with each other. Because it has something genuine woven through it, it may be difficult to make into a mass audience commodity unless brutally shorn of many of its intrinsic qualities. Instead it persists and spreads among initiates as a potent ‘cultic’ form of culture. It does not usually, however, gather about it the more oppressive hierarchical apparatus of ‘a cult’ in the religious sense. It naturally fascinates, rather than ponderously recruits.
Call: Religion and Horror Comics
12 Monday Oct 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Call for papers: Religion and Horror Comics. Deadline for abstracts: 1st December 2020. For a volume of the Religion and Comics academic book series, published by Claremont Press. The planned book appears not to be open-access.
A new Ken Faig book is forthcoming
11 Sunday Oct 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s Blog has updated again. He reveals the forthcoming…
new collection of Ken Faig’s writings on some of the more obscure corners of the Lovecraftian world. Some of these writings have been published in very limited editions by Ken himself as part of his “Moshassuck Monographs” series, but we intend to gather them and others together into a solid volume that will display the depth of Ken’s researches.
I’d known about this planned book via email, but now the good news is public.
Added to Open Lovecraft
06 Tuesday Oct 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
* B. Granic, Aesthetics of the Underworld, 2020. (Masters dissertation for the Department of English, University of Split. Includes the chapter “The concepts of aesthetics and the underworld in the work of H.P. Lovecraft”).
* M. Rosen (Ed.), Diseases of the Head: Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy, PunctumBooks, 2020. (Has the chapters: “Horror of the Real: H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones and Contemporary Speculative Philosophy”; “When the Monstrous Object Becomes a Tremendous Non-Event: Rudolf Otto’s Monster-Gods, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, and Graham Harman’s Theory of Everything”; and “Encountering Weird Objects: Lovecraft, LARP, and Speculative Philosophy”).
New book: The Complete Ivy Frost
05 Monday Oct 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Donald Wandrei’s The Complete Ivy Frost is set to ship. 720 pages, in paper hardcover.
Also shipping soon, the Ray Bradbury edition of The Pulpster, Number 29.
PhD thesis: Gothic Cornwall, 1840-1913
04 Sunday Oct 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
Joan Passey’s Corpses, Coasts, and Carriages: Gothic Cornwall, 1840-1913, an open PhD thesis for the University of Exeter, September 2019, online and public in February 2020.
Fantasy Classification
01 Thursday Oct 2020
Posted in Scholarly works
A detailed proposal for a Fantasy Fiction Dewey Decimal Classification system, as fantasy stood in 1964. An example…
12. Unrationalized permutations, whimsies.
12.5 Animals that talk.
12.6 Unliving things personalized.
I presume things have moved on, both in terms of fine-grained classification and in fantasy’s crossover sub-genres. But it’s still an interesting snapshot of the field at that point in time.
New book: Io Sono Providence, vol. 2
30 Wednesday Sep 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The second volume of Io Sono Providence: la biografia di H.P. Lovecraft is now marked as “Arriving”. This being the ongoing translation of the S.T. Joshi’s famous biography of Lovecraft. The first volume shipped this time last year. Note that Volume 2 of the Italian translation is “1920-1928”, and there will be one more next year for a three-volume set. Congratulations to all concerned, and also for sticking to the release schedule despite the difficulties of the lockdowns in the last six months.
Biology of the Shoggoths
28 Monday Sep 2020
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Fred Lubnow has a new post, “Some Notes on the Biology of the Shoggoths”.
Related in approach is the Superhero Science and Technology academic journal, with articles such as “Marine Fish Antifreeze Proteins: The Key Towards Cryopreserving The Winter Soldier” and “Importance of 3D and Inkjet Printing For Tony Stark and the Iron Man Suit”.
Three more books of Letters in progress
27 Sunday Sep 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s Blog has updated, and the new post makes me aware of a new two volume Czech translation I hadn’t heard about…
I have received a most distinctive item—nothing less than a Czech translation of my edition of The Annotated Revisions and Collaborations of H.P. Lovecraft.
He also gives titles of three forthcoming Letters volumes, presumably set for 2021-22…
Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others; Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others; Letters to Richard F. Searight and E. Hoffmann Price.
Studi Lovecraftiani catch-up
24 Thursday Sep 2020
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
An item of news I missed in summer 2020, the release of a new issue of Studi Lovecraftiani, the leading Italian Lovecraft journal.
No. 18 has…
* Cover painting by Matteo Bocci.
* A homage to the writer and friend Elvezio Sciallis, a narrator and story writer.
* Renzo Giorgetti looks at the symbolic and mythological basis of R’lyeh.
* Fabio Calabrese proposes a “fourth genre” of the fantastic: Lovecraftian fiction. Thus widening the field of fantastic literature.
* Sandro Mezzetto on “some sources of Lovecraft’s fiction”.
* Christian Lamberti on the Randolph Carter cycle.
* Davide Rossato surveys John Carpenter’s Lovecraftian cinema.
* A translation of an early “evaluation” on Lovecraft by Joseph Payne Brennan, being one of the first items of literary criticism of the fiction
* A translation of “HPL and the myths of scientific materialism” by John A. Buettner.
* Lovecraft on Poe’s places… “a full-bodied unpublished work by Lovecraft himself, translated here for the first time, where the Dreamer talks to us about the homes and places of Poe.”
And there’s more. No. 17, too. Since somehow it appears that Tentaclii also missed Studi Lovecraftiani in June 2019. Following hot on the heels of a (perhaps late) January 2019 issue, which may be why I wasn’t looking for a summer issue in 2019.
No. 17 seems to have been about two-thirds a Ramsey Campbell / fiction / poetry issue by the look of it. But it also had unspecified… “essays and articles by Stefano Lazzarin, Renzo Giorgetti, Miranda Gurzo, Riccardo Rosati and others.”
A little further digging reveals some details on these items of non-fiction…
* Riccardo Rosati on HPL’s political thought, apparently comparing him with Evola.
* Stefano Lazzarin on ‘The Veiled Face: hyperbole and reticence in Howard Phillips Lovecraft’.
* Renzo Giorgetti on the importance of dreams as one of HPL’s sources of inspiration.
* Miranda Gurzo who sees “the mythology of Cthulhu as the symbol of the crisis of the modern world”, and suggests HPL’s possible sources in biblical Apocalypse imagery, re: The Book of Job.
* An examination of “Beyond The Wall Of Sleep”, which sounds like an English essay translated to Italian?
* A newly-translated 1937 poem by Lovecraft.