The Threshold of Forever: Essays and Reviews


Book Description

Darrell Schweitzer's third collection of essays and reviews, a successor to the well-received "Windows of the Imagination" and "The Fantastic Horizon," is a balanced mixture of scholarship and entertainment, ranging over the entire spectrum of imaginative literature, from the oldest novel in the world (1st century B.C.) to classic (and not-so-classic) pulp fiction, to childhood reading, to examinations of the works of such masters as H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James, Robert Bloch, Stanley Weinbaum, John W. Campbell, and Thomas M. Disch. In between we encounter such surprising topics as a proposal for an H.P. Lovecraft biopic ("The Whole Wide Lovecraft"), the eccentricities of William Beckford (the author of Vathek), and even a report from Blobfest, an annual street fair devoted to the famous 1958 cult film, at which Schweitzer, as a member of the press, was allowed to touch the original Blob. Many of these pieces have been published in the prestigious "The New York Review of Science Fiction." "Schweitzer writes in an informative style that’s knowledgeable, witty, and high accessible. This is the finest kind of criticism -- it makes you want to read more, both of the critic's own prose and that of the writers he’s discussing. Highly recommended!" -- Robert Reginald. Darrell Schweitzer is a novelist, short-story, writer and critic, a former editor of the legendary "Weird Tales" magazine, and a four-time World Fantasy Award finalist and one-time winner. His previous book of essays, "The Fantastic Horizon," was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award.




Aliens in Popular Culture


Book Description

An indispensable resource, this book provides wide coverage on aliens in fiction and popular culture. The wide impact that the imagined alien has had upon Western culture has not been surveyed before; in many cases the essays in Aliens in Popular Culture are the first written on the topic. The book is a compendium of short entries on notable uses of aliens in popular culture across different media and platforms by almost 90 researchers in the field. It covers science fiction from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first century, including books, films, television, comics, games, and even advertisements. Individual essays point to the ways in which the imagined alien can be seen as a reflection of different fears and tensions within society, above all in the Anglo-American world. The book additionally provides an overview for context and suggestions for further reading. All varieties of readers will find it to be a comprehensive reference about the extra-terrestrial in popular culture.




Calamities


Book Description

WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from CLMP A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader.







Threshold


Book Description

'A wild, sleazy, drug-filled odyssey ... Doyle's maverick novel deserves the accolades coming its way' Independent 'The best work to date from a writer who gets better and better with each release' Irish Indepdendent 'A masterclass in what not to do' New Statesman 'His best book so far: riddling, irreverent, fearless' TLS Rob has spent most of his confusing adult life wandering, writing, and imbibing literature and narcotics in equally vast doses. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, between exaltation and despair, his travels have acquired a de facto purpose: the immemorial quest for transcendent meaning. On a lurid pilgrimage for cheap thrills and universal truth, Doyle's narrator takes us from the menacing peripheries of Paris to the drug-fuelled clubland of Berlin, from art festivals to sun-kissed islands, through metaphysical awakenings in Asia and the brink of destruction in Europe, into the shattering revelations brought on by the psychedelic DMT. A dazzling, intimate, and profound celebration of art and ageing, sex and desire, the limits of thought and the extremes of sensation, Threshold confirms Doyle as one of the most original writers in contemporary literature.




The Crying Book


Book Description

This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry, how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression (The New York Times Book Review). Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen–tear–shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence. Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.




The Truth Is Told Better This Way


Book Description

Pulling from raw themes of grief and death, regret and discomfort, sadness and failure, Worth wears these poems down to their bones. Straddling dreamy, ethereal images and brutal honesty, The Truth is Told Better This Way unravels its secrets one line at a time. The result is oracular and surreal, as each piece could be read as a magic spell that mesmerizes as much as a poem that tantalizes the senses. Praise for The Truth is Better Told This Way: Told with a wink and a sly smile, Worth's deliciously dark and defiant poetry crawls under one's skin and stays there. The characters in The Truth is Told Better This Way dance barefoot on dirty club floors, pee with the door open and whisper their hard-won truth into subway payphones. Like an unforgotten lover whom you just can't shake, the poems in this collection will keep you up at night. --Heather Babcock, author of Of Being Underground and Moving Backwards Liz Worth has never been darker. In this new collection she transforms her craft of confessional writing into a filthy and flourishing fantasia; a witch's brew of the most poetic magicks. --dalton derkson




Threshold Modernism


Book Description

Threshold Modernism reveals how changing ideas about gender and race in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain shaped - and were shaped by - London and its literature. Chapters address key sites, especially department stores, women's clubs, and city streets, that coevolved with controversial types of modern women. Interweaving cultural history, narrative theory, close reading, and spatial analysis, Threshold Modernism considers canonical figures such as George Gissing, Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf alongside understudied British and colonial writers including Amy Levy, B. M. Malabari, A. B. C. Merriman-Labor, Duse Mohamed Ali, and Una Marson. Evans argues that these diverse authors employed the 'new public women' and their associated spaces to grapple with widespread cultural change and reflect on the struggle to describe new subjects, experiences, and ways of seeing in appropriately novel ways. For colonial writers of color, those women and spaces provided a means through which to claim their own places in imperial London.




Seduction and Betrayal


Book Description

A vivid and provocative literary criticism of famous women writers from Virginia Woolf to Zelda Fitzgerald by a “gifted miniaturist biographer” (Joyce Carol Oates) The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America’s most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work of criticism. A gallery of unforgettable portraits—of Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle—as well as a provocative reading of such works as Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath, Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer’s reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.







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