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The Weird
''The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories'' is an anthology of weird fiction edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Published on 30 Oct 2011, it contains 110 short stories, novellas and short novels. At 1,152 pages in the hardcover edition, it is probably the largest single volume of fantastic fiction ever published, according to ''Locus''. Contents The editors' object in publishing ''The Weird'' was to provide, through its contents, a comprehensive definition of "the Weird", a type of fiction that their introduction describes as "as much a ''sensation''"—one of terror and wonder—"as (...) a mode of writing", and as a type of fiction that entertains while also expressing readers' dissatisfaction with, and uncertainty about, reality. To that end, ''The Weird'' includes works that range from fantasy, science fiction and mainstream literature "with a slight twist of strange", but it also amounts, according to ''The Guardian'', to "a history of the horror story". The edi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ann VanderMeer
Ann VanderMeer (née Kennedy) is an American publisher and editor, and the second female editor of the horror magazine ''Weird Tales''. She is the founder of Buzzcity Press. Work from her press and related periodicals has won the British Fantasy Award, the International Rhysling Award, and appeared in several year's best anthologies. VanderMeer was also the founder of ''The Silver Web'' magazine, a periodical devoted to experimental and avant-garde fantasy literature. In 2009 ''Weird Tales'', edited by VanderMeer and Stephen H. Segal, won a Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. Though some of its individual contributors have been honored with Hugos, Nebula Awards, and even one Pulitzer Prize, the magazine itself had never before even been nominated for a Hugo. It was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2009. She has also edited with her husband Jeff VanderMeer such influential and award-winning anthologies as ''The New Weird'', ''The Weird'', and ''The Big Book of Science ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Algernon Blackwood
Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (14 March 1869 – 10 December 1951) was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's." and that his short story collection '' Incredible Adventures'' (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century". Life and work Blackwood was born in Shooter's Hill (now part of south-east London, then part of north-west Kent). Between 1871 and 1880, he lived at Crayford Manor House, Crayford and he was educated at Wellington College. His father, Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, was a Post Office administrator; his mother, Harriet Dobbs, was the widow of the 6th Duke of Manchester. According to Peter Penzoldt, his father, "though not devoid of genuine good-heartedness, had appallingly narrow religious id ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the short story "The Metamorphosis" and novels ''The Trial'' and '' The Castle''. The term ''Kafkaesque'' has entered English to describe absurd situations, like those depicted in his writing. Kafka was born into a middle-class German-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today the capital of the Czech Republic. He trained as a lawyer and after completing his legal education was employed full-ti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francis Stevens
Gertrude Barrows Bennett (September 18, 1884February 2, 1948), known by the pseudonym Francis Stevens, was a pioneering author of fantasy and science fiction.''Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965'' by Eric Leif Davin, Lexington Books, 2005, pages 409-10. Bennett wrote a number of fantasies between 1917 and 1923. and has been called "the woman who invented dark fantasy"."The Woman Who Invented Dark Fantasy" by Gary C. Hoppenstand from ''Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy'' by Francis Stevens, University of Nebraska Press, 2004, page x. Her most famous books include ''Claimed'' (which Augustus T. Swift, in a letter to ''Argosy (magazine), The Argosy'' called "One of the strangest and most compelling science fantasy novels you will ever read") and the Lost World (genre), lost world novel ''The Citadel of Fear''. Bennett also wrote an early utopian and dystopian fiction, dystopian novel, ''The Heads of Cerberus'' (1919).''The Cambridge Com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hell Screen
is a short story written by Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. It was a reworking of ''Uji Shūi Monogatari'' and originally published in 1918 as a serialization in two newspapers. It was later published in a collection of Akutagawa short stories, ''Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū''. Translation "Hell Screen" was first translated into English by W.H.H. Norman in 1948, in his collection of Akutagawa short stories ''Hell Screen and Other Stories''. Numerous variant translations have followed, including the most recent one translated by Jay Rubin and published by Penguin Group. Plot overview "Hell Screen" is narrated by a mostly uninvolved servant who witnesses or hears of the events. The plot of "Hell Screen" centers on the artist Yoshihide. Yoshihide is considered “the greatest painter in the land”,Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. "Hell Screen." 1918. ''Rashōmon and 17 Other Stories''. Trans. Jay Rubin. New York City: Penguin Group, 2006. 3–9. and is often commissioned to create wo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luigi Ugolini
Luigi Ugolini (25 June 1891 – 22 June 1980) was an Italian writer. He is best known for his series of fictionalized biographies of Italian leaders in art and science, and for a volume of work that immortalizes traditions, values and ways of life of Tuscany and Florence. Ugolini left an early career as a lawyer to write, and his literary works, many of which are inducted as scholastic required reading in Italian schools, earned a worldwide reputation and several prestigious literary awards. He was also a painter, an expert ornithologist and gastronome. Biography Luigi Ugolini descended from a noble family of Tuscany whose recorded lineage dates back to 1585 in Arezzo, Italy. Ugolini was born in Florence, where his Siena-born father and his grandfather both had medical practices. Ugolini was a nobleman who was known to prefer the company of poor farmers in the regions of Maremma, whom he described as truer gentlemen than many of those so-called gentlemen in the city. Accounts dep ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore (; bn, রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of ''Gitanjali'', he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Referred to as "the Bard of Bengal", Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudev, Kobiguru, Biswakobi. A Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan district* * * and Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-yea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hanns Heinz Ewers
Hanns Heinz Ewers (3 November 1871 – 12 June 1943) was a German actor, poet, philosopher, and writer of short stories and novels. While he wrote on a wide range of subjects, he is now known mainly for his works of horror, particularly his trilogy of novels about the adventures of Frank Braun, a character modeled on himself. The best known of these is ''Alraune'' (1911).Henry and Mary Garland, ''The Oxford companion to German literature''.Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997. (pp.221–222).Mary Ellen Snodgrass,''Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature''. New York, Facts on File (2004). (p.106-7) Career Born in Düsseldorf, Ewers started to write poetry when he was 17 years old. His first noticed poem was an obituary tribute to the German Emperor Frederick III. Ewers earned his Abitur in March 1891. He then volunteered for the military and joined the ''Kaiser-Alexander-Gardegrenadier-Regiment No. 1'', but was dismissed 44 days later because of myopia. Ewers's literary career b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gustav Meyrink
Gustav Meyrink (19 January 1868 – 4 December 1932) was the pseudonym of Gustav Meyer, an Austrian author, novelist, dramatist, translator, and banker, most famous for his novel '' The Golem''. He has been described as the "most respected German language writer in the field of supernatural fiction". Childhood Gustav Meyrink was born with the name ''Gustav Meyer'' in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) on 19 January 1868. He was the illegitimate son of Baron Karl von Varnbüler und zu Hemmingen, a Württembergian minister, and actress Maria Wilhelmina Adelheyd Meier. Meyrink was not, despite the statements of some of his contemporaries, of Jewish descent – this rumour arose due to a confusion of his mother with a Jewish woman of the same name. Until thirteen years of age Meyrink lived mainly in Munich, where he completed elementary school. He then stayed in Hamburg for a brief time, until his mother relocated to Prague in 1883. Prague Meyrink lived in Prague for twenty ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lord Dunsany
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (; 24 July 1878 – 25 October 1957, usually Lord Dunsany) was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist. Over 90 volumes of fiction, essays, poems and plays appeared in his lifetime.Lanham, Maryland, USA, 1993: Rowman & Littlefield; Joshi, S.T. and Schweitzer, Darrell; Lord Dunsany: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Studies in Supernatural Literature series). Material has continued to appear. He gained a name in the 1910s as a great writer in the English-speaking world. Best known today are the 1924 fantasy novel, ''The King of Elfland's Daughter'', and his first book, ''The Gods of Pegāna'', which depicts a fictional pantheon. Born in London as heir to an old Irish peerage, he was raised partly in Kent, but later lived mainly at Ireland's possibly longest-inhabited home, Dunsany Castle near Tara. He worked with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory supporting the Abbey Theatre and some fellow writers. He was a chess and pistol champio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Casting The Runes
"Casting the Runes" is a short story written by the English writer M.R. James. It was first published in 1911 as the fourth story in ''More Ghost Stories'', which was James' second collection of ghost stories. Plot summary Mr. Edward Dunning is a researcher for the British Museum. At the beginning of the story he has recently reviewed ''The Truth of Alchemy'' by a Mr. Karswell, an alchemist and occultist. Afterwards he begins seeing the name John Harrington displayed wherever he goes. He learns that Harrington also reviewed Karswell's work and died in a freak accident not long after. Harrington's brother helps Dunning to discover that Karswell cursed both men by slipping them a piece of paper with some runes on it. They deduce that the curse, once cast, will cause the bearer to die in three months. They track down Karswell a day before the curse is set to kill Dunning and manage to return the runes to him. Karswell dies the next day, killed by a stone that falls from scaffolding ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
