Powerful insights from Ed Simon, Editor-at-Large for LARB’s Marginalia, in an essay for The Millions in which he not only traces a history of hauntedness in various key works of literature (by the likes of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Morrison, Chambers, Lovecraft, and King) but relates a couple of his own genuinely weird personal encounters with…
Tag: literature
Jonathan Franzen on literature as the key to a deeper life
From an interview with Franzen by Jianan Qian in The Millions: TM: You also mentioned on a number of occasions that literature saved you. Could you elaborate on the notion of literary salvation? JF: What would I have meant by that? I don’t think it literally saved my life. TM: I suppose it’s not that…
Philip Roth on the value of serious literature amid the hellscape of contemporary America
Philip Roth, 1973 Here’s Nathaniel Rich, writing for The New York Review of Books about Philip Roth’s Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013: Between the interviews given in self-defense, the conversations with peers, and the exchanges with angry Jews, there emerges from Roth’s nonfiction a unified theory of the novel as a bulwark against the excesses…
T. E. D. Klein’s second novel ‘Nighttown’ to become a reality after all?
Mirabile dictu, word has emerged that T. E. D. Klein’s second novel Nighttown, which has been delayed for the past 30 years, may actually see the light of day. Remember back in the late 1980s when Nighttown was announced all over the place? Viking, who published Klein’s previous two books — the now classic Dark Gods…
Announcing the birth of “Vastarien: A Literary Journal”
“Birthday Boy” by Chris Mars (The following announcement was first posted yesterday at Thomas Ligotti Online and has now begun to propagate via social media. In addition to the fact that a journal like Vastarien will undoubtedly interest many readers of The Teeming Brain, I’m posting the info about it here for the pointedly personal…
The scourge of “relatability” in the arts
Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker: What are the qualities that make a work “relatable,” and why have these qualities come to be so highly valued? To seek to see oneself in a work of art is nothing new, nor is it new to enjoy the sensation. Since Freud theorized the process of identification —…
New (and old) book projects: An encyclopedia of horror literature and a collection of horror fiction
Frontispiece to Frankenstein (1831 edition). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. On a morning when I’ve just finished up with several days of responding to publisher copy edits on Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics, I’m happy to announce the birth of another book project: I have just signed a contract with the same publisher (ABC-CLIO) to edit…
An interview with Thomas Ligotti: “I was born to fear”
Thomas Ligotti Here’s something special for the Ligotti fans among us (and I know there are a lot of you reading this): Sławomir Wielhorski’s interview with Tom is now reprinted here at The Teeming Brain and available for your free reading and enjoyment. The interview was first published in Poland. Then the English version made…
The numinous, subversive power of art in an artificial age: Talking with J. F. Martel
Now live: my interview with Canadian filmmaker J. F. Martel, author of the just-published — and thoroughly wonderful — Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which should be of interest to all Teeming Brainers since it comes with glowing blurb recommendations from the likes of Daniel Pinchbeck, Patrick Harpur, Erik Davis, and yours…
Ursula K. Le Guin: Poets and visionaries are “realists of a larger reality”
Here are some powerful, moving, and beautiful words from Ursula K. Le Guin at the recent National Book Awards, where she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and used the opportunity to talk about the value of visionary literature and the ugliness and danger of treating books as pure commodities: I rejoice…