Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories consists of scores of delightful and lyrical vignettes (or sketches, as Walser himself would call them) of Swiss life in the early twentieth century, ranging from youthful country life to a more ruthless [...]
What I despise most of all from a book is inaction. Something must happen. The protagonist must change in some way. There are many great books where seemingly few events transpire, but on the consciousness of the page, great changes are taking [...]
He is the “the man with the TV eyes” and he has come to watch her die. In his pain-starved culture, voyeurism upon death passes as entertainment. In the futuristic world of The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, disease is all but eradicated and no [...]
There are those few, extraordinary books that make me want to go back and alter all the reviews that I have previously written, so that I might give a certain book more glory by comparison. Such is the case with Jean D’Ormesson’s [...]
Readers often turn to fiction in order to glimpse at other modes of living, but this need not always be true. In the midst of a global homogeneity that has been growing steadily for over a hundred years, there yet remain those people who do not [...]
How far will mankind go to change the world in which it lives? At what point do we encounter the line and turn back, acknowledging some barriers should not be overcome for the sake of our dreams? Some individuals do not have this discretion, [...]
Ostensibly, Anti-Education is Nietzsche’s tirade against the German education system. But, as with all Nietzsche, nothing is straightforward and nothing is as it seems to be. In this material drawn from five 1872 lectures, Nietzsche [...]
Few writers seem to have so much joy in the craft of storytelling as Charles Beaumont; his enthusiasm clings to the page like sweat on a hyperhidrotic hand. A close friend of the incomparable Ray Bradbury, Beaumont was challenged by his literary [...]
Be afraid, gentle readers! Another world rests firmly atop our own – a world of chaos and horrors ineffable. It would only take a gentle nudge, the smallest inertial force, to break through the veil and inundate the mind with its sea of [...]
Contained within this volume are tales of madness. But it is not just the characters who are driven mad in this Lovecraftian collection of weird tales; the reader is driven mad as well. The knowledge of a bizarre other world is not what prompts [...]
Shadows of Carcosa will best be enjoyed at night, in a dark house, with only a single reading lamp resisting the encroaching darkness. This collection is a reprint of a previous NYRB title under the name The Colour Out of Space, after the [...]
Doubt is the overwhelming feeling of Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan. This classic 1962 novel of exorcism does not share the clean-cut theatricality of its descendants, like Blatty’s more well-known The Exorcist (1971), but [...]
Carefully plotted literary horror is the meat and potatoes of my literary diet. The Rim of Morning, by William Sloane, was a filling meal after a long day in the trenches. The two novels within this collection (To Walk the Night and The Edge of [...]
Planet Earth is nothing but a backwater tourist trap in A Planet For Rent, written by the Cuban science fiction author Yoss and recently translated into English. Told in seven loosely linked stories (with a few vignettes to help explain this new [...]
At last, they are finally publishing science fiction from Cuba, starting with A Legend of the Future by Agustin de Rojas. Hailed as the father of Cuban science fiction, this work was first published back in 1985 and is only now being translated [...]
Allow me to begin by apologizing to my readers. It would be better if I were allowed to “suffer in silence,” as Emmanuel Bove is so fond of saying; but alas, I must write this review of Henri Duchemin and His Shadows and so my suffering must be [...]
Classicists have a hard go at maintaining relevance in this day and age. Trust me, I know; I studied this stuff in school and was a bit of an academic leper for it. So often my kind is kicked to the curb and told that it does not contribute to [...]
I first encountered Wyndham in that delightful tale of carnivorous plants overrunning the earth entitled The Day of the Triffids. What struck me most about Wyndham’s style is his natural (and seemingly effortless) dialogue with which he [...]
After spending four years in a Siberian Prison Camp for circulating literary works deemed seditious, Dostoevsky did not immediately go on to pen his most classic works; first, having suffered greatly in body and spirit, he returned to the public [...]
I typically look forward to a collection of essays with a dread akin to that of a dentist appointment. It is not that there is anything necessarily bad with essays or dentists, I just find them both boring and uncomfortable. The essayist tends [...]
