Though best known as a novelist, Virginia Woolf wrote more words of nonfiction than fiction. Her nonfiction oeuvre spans six dense volumes of collected essays, six volumes of collected letters, five volumes of collected diaries, plus the book-length essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas and the biography Roger Fry. […]
Late in Joel Lane’s 2003 novel The Blue Mask, a character discusses his favorite books by Jean Genet: “I often think his scenarios are built up, not just from solitary fantasies, but from real sex. The books are a fundamental part of his love life. What he does on the […]
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) is best known today for two short stories, “The Wendigo” and “The Willows”, both considered among the best works of horror, supernatural, or weird fiction in English. Not far behind those in reputation are a couple of his stories of the occult detective John Silence (especially “Ancient Sorceries”). Beyond […]
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of leading a discussion with Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, co-director of punctum books and editor of my punctum book, About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community. This was part of my regular academic work, as it was a program I set up via […]
From all the manifold images traditionally marshaled, none so dreadfully resembles the Gorgon head as the face of human death. —Caroline Anderson By any honest reckoning, Tanith Lee was one of the most versatile and influential writers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction in the English language during the last 100 […]
The first shot of Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár is phone held by an unknown person, filming a sleeping Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) on a plane. Over the image pop up chat messages: —our girls an early riser isnt she —haunted —ha you mean she has a conscience —maybe —you still […]
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 […]
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”, […]
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 […]
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 […]
This is the text of a paper I presented at the Modernist Studies Association annual conference, which this year took place in Brooklyn, New York, not far from where James Purdy lived for many years. Since I don’t have plans to develop this particular presentation beyond what it was, I […]
In 2018, I wrote a post at The Mumpsimus about Raymond Carver, inspired by Brian Evenson’s little book about Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Soon after I published it, Google decided the post was plagiarized clickbait and removed it. I could never figure out what […]
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