What if… Lovecraft had developed a recognisable continuing character? Here’s John Spelling‘s delicious take on the idea of remixing The Shadow with Lovecraft…
The Shadow knows…
22 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Museum of Fantastic Specimens
21 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The online Museum of Fantastic Specimens (in Japanese, but Google Chrome should automatically translate the page from Japanese to English). The Tokyo Drift Museum of the South Seas gallery is a special treat, although all the pictures are relatively small…
[ Hat-tip: Propnomicon ]
Grotesque Animals (1872)
21 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books
Monster Brains unearths an online copy of Edward William Cooke’s Grotesque Animals (1872).
WSJ on As If and Lovecraft
21 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in New books
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.”
Selected Letters set with 2nd Ed. Index
20 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in Odd scratchings
A London bookseller appears to have a set of first edition Selected Letters available, complete with the expanded second edition of the Index, for £300.
Facsimile Dust Jackets for Lovecraft
20 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in Unnamable
Missing the dust-jacket to your Arkham Press rarity? Facsimile Dust Jackets claims to be able to supply you with the requisite wrapper for H.P. Lovecraft titles…
Or you could just frame them?
Three Messages and a Warning – new Mexican anthology
20 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in New books
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.
Frankenstein’s Moon
19 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Podcasts etc.
Given Lovecraft’s interest in astronomy, and his use of it in fiction, this new 28 minute BBC Radio 4 documentary might interest — Frankenstein’s Moon (“Listen Again” online in the UK)…
“Did the Moon shining into Mary Shelley’s bedroom in June 1816 play a part in the genesis of her Frankenstein story? Adam Rutherford explores this and other influences cast by astronomical phenomena on the work of writers and artists, such as Galileo’s painter friend Ludovico Cigoli, Arthur Conan Doyle, and modern Sherlock creator Mark Gatiss.”
January
19 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Odd scratchings
“Of course, it’s in January that I really dig down into the nethermost recesses of my burrow,” — H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters: Volume 2.
Intersectionality and Lovecraft
19 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Unnamable
Roundtable: Intersectionality and Lovecraft, from a 12th Jan Locus Online roundtable. “Intersectionality” is a feminist theory term that suggests one’s different social and cultural identities — being a woman, being lesbian, being black, being disabled, being a daughter — interact in society to form more intractable tangles of discrimination. It has since been ported more generally into a variety of leftist academic approaches such as sociology and cultural studies, where it knocks around with subtler theories of hybridity, ‘fluid identity’ versions of queer, and various ideas on how online identities are lived out.
Fine Books and Collections mag on Lovecraft
18 Wednesday Jan 2012
Posted in Historical context
Back in May 2011, Fine Books and Collections magazine led with a Lovecraft article, now freely available online…
Lovecraft’s Providence: “The homes and haunts of horror and science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft”, By Nick Mamatas. With a breakout mini article on the question of “Lovecraft’s First Book?”
More recent academic work
17 Tuesday Jan 2012
Posted in Scholarly works
A couple of interesting academic works in open PDF form, from 2011…
The Indigenous Gothic Novel: tribal twists, native monsters, and the politics of appropriation, by Amy Elizabeth Gore. M.A. dissertation, 2011.
“Bibliographica Necronomica : selections from the literature of grimoires, cursed books and unholy bindings” by Kurt X. Metzmeier. Newsletter of Legal History & Rare Books (Special Interest Section, American Association of Law Libraries), Volume 17 Number 2, Fall 2011.