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 […]
At the end of February, my favorite critic of horror cinema, Willow Catelyn Maclay, wrote a piece for her Patreon titled “The Aesthetic of Loneliness in Horror”. It’s subscribers-only, so I won’t quote much from it here, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since I first read it, and […]
A question I have come back to when providing feedback on a couple of very different manuscripts for friends recently: What is it important for the reader to know? With one of those manuscripts in particular, it was really a question of how much the writer wanted to leave the […]
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 […]
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”, […]
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 […]
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 […]