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Books read in June and July
Aug. 5th, 2009 11:48 amNote that I review a couple of academic collections on themes in Shakespeare lit and film in my "Books read in June," whic follows this entry.
1. Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction edited by Steve Berman (Issue 1, Summer 2009) [etext available upon request]
I'm really excited about this new journal, since genre fiction seems to have such a strong intersection with queer fiction. My favorite piece was a nonfiction article, “Watching Dark Shadows” by Jeff Mann, which seems like a particularly timely piece as I hear that Johnny Depp just agreed to play the role of Barnabas Collins in the film remake of the series. The issue also contained short stories, interviews, and a brief section at the back which mentions new and soon-to-be-released gay genre fiction.
Here's the blurb about the journal:
"a periodical dedicated to gay fantasy, horror, science fiction, as well as weird stories that fall through the cracks-between" Lethe Press
2. Dead Reckonings Issue 5 Spring 2009 edited by (2009) [scanned myself]
In my opinion this is the best literary horror journal around and one of the few periodicals that I await with impatience. It points me to the good stuff, helps me avoid the tedious stuff, and often prompts me to reread the classics. In addition, it offers the occasional wtf? surprise such as this issues list of best horror muisc, written by Ramsey Campbells (and just in time to update my gothy classical music selections for Halloween).
3. Locke and Key by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez (200) [read aloud by LJ user alexx_kay]
Continuing the creepy chronicles of what happens when the Locke siblings move to the old family home located in Lovecraft, a small town in New England. Hill is writing a fast-paced yet intricate story, and Rodriguez is providing some wonderful illustrations.
4. Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum (2006) [scanned myself]
This is a fascinating book written by a science writer who follows the development of the spiritualism movement in America and Britain during the lifetime of William James and a dozen or so other famous scholars and scientists, many of them Nobel Prize winners. I'm not so much interested in spiritualism specifically but as a general case study in how individuals used it as a means for resisting the despiritualization of the world after Darwinism became widely accepted. I'm intrigued with how people who were for the most part integrated into the scientific and academic communities provided theories which resisted scientific declaration that there is no such thing as god with either an upper or lowercase g, no such things as spirits, or anything other than what can be perceived materially through the senses. As pointed out by the historian Ronald Hutton _The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft_ (1999), spiritualism was just one of an ongoing series of counterculture movements against materialism which had been occurring since the Enlightenment and, as in the case of Romanticism in Germany and Britain, these resistances were expressed in art and literature as well as in nonfiction writings. The people creating modern paganism were also reading the scholarly writings in the fields of not only science but of folklore and archeology, and what got published became adopted and integrated into what participants and practitioners of these counterculture movements insisted were older unbroken traditions dating from prehistory, thus not so much denying the theories of the sciences as finding ways to reinterpret them.
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1. Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction edited by Steve Berman (Issue 1, Summer 2009) [etext available upon request]
I'm really excited about this new journal, since genre fiction seems to have such a strong intersection with queer fiction. My favorite piece was a nonfiction article, “Watching Dark Shadows” by Jeff Mann, which seems like a particularly timely piece as I hear that Johnny Depp just agreed to play the role of Barnabas Collins in the film remake of the series. The issue also contained short stories, interviews, and a brief section at the back which mentions new and soon-to-be-released gay genre fiction.
Here's the blurb about the journal:
"a periodical dedicated to gay fantasy, horror, science fiction, as well as weird stories that fall through the cracks-between" Lethe Press
2. Dead Reckonings Issue 5 Spring 2009 edited by (2009) [scanned myself]
In my opinion this is the best literary horror journal around and one of the few periodicals that I await with impatience. It points me to the good stuff, helps me avoid the tedious stuff, and often prompts me to reread the classics. In addition, it offers the occasional wtf? surprise such as this issues list of best horror muisc, written by Ramsey Campbells (and just in time to update my gothy classical music selections for Halloween).
3. Locke and Key by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez (200) [read aloud by LJ user alexx_kay]
Continuing the creepy chronicles of what happens when the Locke siblings move to the old family home located in Lovecraft, a small town in New England. Hill is writing a fast-paced yet intricate story, and Rodriguez is providing some wonderful illustrations.
4. Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum (2006) [scanned myself]
This is a fascinating book written by a science writer who follows the development of the spiritualism movement in America and Britain during the lifetime of William James and a dozen or so other famous scholars and scientists, many of them Nobel Prize winners. I'm not so much interested in spiritualism specifically but as a general case study in how individuals used it as a means for resisting the despiritualization of the world after Darwinism became widely accepted. I'm intrigued with how people who were for the most part integrated into the scientific and academic communities provided theories which resisted scientific declaration that there is no such thing as god with either an upper or lowercase g, no such things as spirits, or anything other than what can be perceived materially through the senses. As pointed out by the historian Ronald Hutton _The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft_ (1999), spiritualism was just one of an ongoing series of counterculture movements against materialism which had been occurring since the Enlightenment and, as in the case of Romanticism in Germany and Britain, these resistances were expressed in art and literature as well as in nonfiction writings. The people creating modern paganism were also reading the scholarly writings in the fields of not only science but of folklore and archeology, and what got published became adopted and integrated into what participants and practitioners of these counterculture movements insisted were older unbroken traditions dating from prehistory, thus not so much denying the theories of the sciences as finding ways to reinterpret them.
( continued below cut )
