Vampire Weekend have a new album coming out in April and have released a couple singles from it, “Gen X Cops” and “Capricorn”, as well as videos to go along with them. The videos both use imagery of New York City in what looks to me like the 1970s and early 1980s. […]
Arthur Machen’s short story “The White People” remains a masterpiece and perhaps his most difficult work of fiction — what Absalom, Absalom! is for Faulkner, what Finnegans Wake is for Joyce, “The White People” is for Machen. Though Machen wrote the story when Joyce was a teenager and Faulkner a toddler, its challenges […]
I thought I might share some thoughts on my new story “The Testament of a Puppeteer”, which I posted to my website yesterday. Today seems the perfect day to do so, as it is Edgar Allan Poe’s 215th birthday, and Poe’s spirit plays a small part in the story’s end. […]
On my website, I’ve now posted a new horror story, “The Testament of the Puppeteer”, a grotesque revenge comedy (though without many laughs). It’s available both as a webpage and as a downloadable ePub file for eReaders. In the winter of 2021, I posted a previously-unpublished story on the site […]
Last week, I attended the annual Modern Language Association Convention, this year in Philadelphia. While in general I am still skeptical of the amount of resources that academic conventions require (money, time, stress), I enjoy MLA — it’s an opportunity to hear about things I don’t get much opportunity to […]
This week, I’ve been attending the annual Modern Language Association Convention, which this year is in Philadelphia. On Saturday, January 6, I was a member of a panel celebrating “100 Years of Mrs. Brown” where we looked at the implications and influence of Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, […]
Ends and beginnings. I have no sense of 2023 as a particular thing, and I expect in the future that I will think back to various events and items of the year and not remember that 2023 was their year. Perhaps this is a post-2020 effect. The years feel indistinguishable. […]
For at least a year now, I’ve been making random notes toward what may, in coming decades, if I live long enough, become a book about fiction and magic (and by magic, I mean both prestidigitation and occult ideas). Since I would like these Lexias to be opportunities for trying […]
In April 2024, Lethe Press will publish a new horror novella I wrote, Changes in the Land. The paperback is now available for pre-order from Lethe, and the Kindle version can be pre-ordered from Amazon. The wonderful cover and a really thoughtful interior design was created by Jeremy Parker, one […]
The most famous line in Harold Pinter’s script for the 1971 film The Go-Between is also the most famous line from the L.P. Hartley novel it adapted — its first line: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” In his beguiling and unsettling new film May December, Todd Haynes […]
In an interview with Steven Millhauser at the LA Review of Books, Kevin Koczwara asks, “Is there something that you love about the short story form? Today, it seems, short stories are out of style for one reason or another. Maybe they never were in vogue—I am thinking of how John […]
Harry Houdini began his 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits (likely written for him by his assistant Oscar Teale) with a confession: From my early career as a mystical entertainer I have been interested in Spiritualism as belonging to the category of mysticism, and as a side line to my […]