A Sherlock Holmes specialist named Leslie S. Klinger has reportedly announced he is working on a New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft volume, for mainstream publisher W.W. Norton, due out in 2015. He’s a U.S. lawyer who has previously crafted The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: Vols. 1 & 2, The Short Stories, and Vol. 3, The Novels (2004), and The New Annotated Dracula (2008), both published in sumptious-but-affordable doorstopper editions by W.W. Norton. I’m a fan and not a scholar of the Holmes stories, and I have little interest in vampires, so I have to say that Klinger is a name that has passed me by until now. I haven’t delved into it very deeply, but there appears to be some controversy around his annotated volumes. Wilum Pugmire reports on Facebook that… “S.T. [Joshi] figures that most of the annotations in the [Klinger] Lovecraft volume will be culled from his own commentary”.

The Wall Street Journal Bookshelf’s Tom Shippey reviews As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford Uni Press, 2012)…

“Mr. Saler counterpunches vigorously against the whole edifice of literary snobbery [against SF, fantasy and the weird]. What he has to say is so self-evidently right that the fact he has to say it makes one wonder how the critical profession has managed, for so long, to cultivate such a large blind spot. His book should be essential reading in every graduate school of the humanities. But it’s much more fun than that recommendation suggests.”

Launching on 26th Jan in Texas at the Creativity and the Brain conference, a new doorstopper 300-page anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic. It’s from Small Beer Press, and the book is in English…

“Thirty four all-original Mexican science fiction and fantasy features ghost stories, supernatural folktales, alien incursions, and apocalyptic narratives, as well as science-based chronicles of highly unusual mental states in which the borders of fantasy and reality reach unprecedented levels of ambiguity. Introduction by Bruce Sterling.”

Here’s Alberto Chimal reading his story from the anthology, “Variation on a Theme of Coleridge”…

[vimeo 34914275]

Amazon USA currently has the paper version available for pre-order at an enticing $10 with free shipping, for those who own surgical wrist supports. No news of any lighter-weight Kindle edition, although there will be a $10 PDF edition for tablet PC users.