Start the music playing and then read the excerpted texts that follow, which may or may not be connected to each other and/or the music. (The music is JĂłhann JĂłhannsson’s “Fordlandia,” titled after Henry Ford’s epic, disastrous, and somehow mythically tragic folly of trying to create an artificial industrial worker’s utopia in the Amazon rainforest…
Tag: Books
Mass culture, best-sellerism, and the future of literature
From an essay by Philip Van Doren Stern that was first published in Virginia Quarterly Review in January 1942, immediately after America’s entry into the Second World War and several decades into the rise of modern mass culture: Bookselling itself has changed. It has taken a lesson from the department store which long ago learned…
Calvin, Hobbes, and Bill Watterson’s advice on creating a soul-satisfying life
I spent many years reading/reveling in Calvin and Hobbes, both live (so to speak) in the newspaper comics section during its original run from 1985 to 1995 and then later in the many book-length collections. This still ranks among my most cherished literary and artistic experiences. The strip was not only hilarious but frequently brilliant,…
Recommended Reading 36
This week: How entire U.S. towns now rely on food stamps. The regrets of the Iraqi “sledgehammer man,” whose image became famous in Western media when Saddam’s statue fell. The Obama administration’s epic (and hypocritical) focus on secrecy. The demise of Google Reader and what it portends for Net-i-fied life and culture. The sinister rise…
Lovecraftian Legacy
A Search for the Heroic in Lovecraftian Fiction, Part Two NOTE: This article is the second in a series. It follows directly on from Part One, which sets the stage. * * * Having established that Lovecraft’s stories can be at least vaguely cheerful and optimistic, and that they can also feature feats of heroism…
Book Review: ‘Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History’ by Richard Smoley
NOTE: This is a longer version of a review that also appears at New York Journal of Books. The book itself was published just today. Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History, by Richard Smoley. Tarcher/Penguin. Published February 7, 2013. 240 pages. Reviewed by Matt Cardin There’s a handful of writers working today whose books about…
Book Review: Wiley-Blackwell’s ‘The Encyclopedia of the Gothic’
A couple of months ago I was invited to join the Reviewer Panel at the online New York Journal of Books. NYJB gives their official blessing and permission to reviewers who want to republish their reviews at their own sites, so that’s something you’ll start seeing here at The Teeming Brain in weeks and months…
From Michael Dirda, “an exhortation to read, read, read”
Over at The American Scholar, Michael Dirda is retiring his wonderful “Browsings” column. (In case you’re somehow unaware of Michael Dirda — a crazy thought — he “is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, and…
Publishers Weekly praises Richard Gavin’s ‘At Fear’s Altar’
We’re very pleased to see that At Fear’s Altar, the numinous horror collection by our own Richard Gavin, has received an excellent review from Publishers Weekly. A couple of months ago we passed along some strong praise from other reviewers. Now PW has this to say about the book: Literate horror fans who have yet…
In Praise of Horror that Horrifies
The Horror genre can evoke a panorama of emotions in its audience. Dread, lust, anxiety, giddiness, and even joy often arise, sometimes in paradoxical combinations. Peculiarly enough, it seems that the one emotion the genre evokes most rarely is the one from which its name is derived. In plain speaking, the genre is rarely frightening….