“The best spooky tales to read this season” by Michael Dirda (WP)

Believe it or not, but I saved the link shared by the best ever publisher Hippocampus Press a while ago (before Hallowe’en, I believe!), got distracted by something fairly mundane and completely forgot to post it in time! But better later than never, so here we go: a brilliant (as usual) analysis of a bunch of horror editions, old and new, by Michael Dirda, including the most recent releases by fantastic Hippocampus Press, “The Voice in the Night: Best Weird Stories of William Hope Hodgson” and “Where the Silent Ones Watch”:

Though best known for its authoritative editions of Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press also issues work by other grandmasters of supernatural literature, most recently “The Voice in the Night: Best Weird Stories of William Hope Hodgson,” edited by S.T. Joshi. No one who has read this collection’s title story — I first encountered it in a high school English textbook — ever forgets “The Voice in the Night.” On a starless night in the Pacific, a becalmed sailing ship is unexpectedly hailed by a voice from the darkness. The unseen man in a small boat begs for some food but refuses to approach too closely. Eventually, the voice recounts how he and his fiancée were shipwrecked and saved from death only when their raft drifted to a nearby island, much of it covered by a “gray, lichenous fungus.” It would be unfair to say more, except that this is a tale of equal parts horror and pathos.

LP 6: call for papers is open!

Cfp - done; the respective timeline for publications - done; the first feedback from the authors - check. That was a great but a loooong day!

The season is officially open: first mulled wine and mince pies (Marks & Engels have outdone themselves this year: their mince pies with caramelised brown sugar are incredible!)

С.А. Светличная (1940 - 2024)

Умерла Светлана Светличная.

Кто-то сразу вспомнит советскую фам фаталь «под Ким Новак» Анну Сергеевну с гэгами из «Бриллиантовой руки», а позже ее появление в бесчисленных ток-шоу на гиньоль-тв — полубезумное, неуместное и несчастливое (шум и блестки не прощают старости и болезней), — но лучше все же не забывать, кем она по-настоящему была — актрисой из того, старого поколения, ушедшего теперь уже безвозвратно.

Ее лучшая роль для меня — молчаливой девушки из одновременно неореалистического и годаровского ноктюрна Михаила Калика «Любить»: киноволшебство, в котором отчуждение и тоска сняты так, что слова в их изображении были и правда излишни.

Светлая ей память и Царствие Небесное.

"Ghost Stories of an Antiquary" by Nunkie Theatre: soon in Cambridge!

As this December marks the 120th anniversary of the publication of M R James’s “Ghost Stories of an Antiquary,” brilliant Robert Lloyd Parry aka Nunkie Theatre will perform all eight stories from the collection over two nights in Cambridge, Friday 20 and Saturday 21! 

I was lucky enough to grab two tickets, and, as a result, L. an I are going on December 20, and I simply cannot wait!

“In the fray: How to teach contemporary literature” by Tim Parks (TLS)

In other words, history will decide on its own accord, which has nothing to do with your best effort to give a full picture of the current literary process (mainstream and not):

Certainly, there are endless books being written. Worldwide, more than 100,000 novels are published in English each year. Even the prize-winners run into scores. So the first challenge is which authors to teach – the celebrities, those who sold most? – and the second what to say about them. “Here, if we could recognize it”, wrote Virginia Woolf. contemplating new titles in a bookshop, “lies some poem, or novel, or history which will stand up and speak with other ages about our age when we lie prone and silent…”. But it was “oddly difficult”, she continued, to say “which are the real books and what it is that they are telling us, and which are the stuffed books which will come to pieces when they have lain about for a year or two”.

So, if we teach contemporary literature, we must do so with the sobering awareness that we may well be teaching also-rans. Any number of authors as celebrated in their day as Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith are today have long been forgotten. Who was reputed “the most published man of the nineteenth century” and “the most popular writer of his time”? Not Dickens, but G. M. W. Reynolds. Hardly a household name. ©

New Susanne Clarke’s book is here: it’s a short story set in the same universe as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

Who said that November had to be grey all along?

A bit more King’s Lynn (photos)

King’s Lynn’s tutti quanti: gargoyles, tilted Tudor houses, Gothic churches in dusk etc.

Лента Твиттера внезапно перенастроилась и предлагает мне выбрать депутатов в румынский Парламент. Я не то, чтобы против (всецело за), но пока в кандидатах не будет Влада Цепеша и ребят Dragostea Din Tei*, я свой бюллетень приберегу.

___________

* Они то ли молдаване, то ли румыны, но в контексте я бы проголосовала все равно