Book Recommendations

I discovered Cendrars about seven years ago.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21560555

Please don't stop with Moravagine. Some of his other novels are equally or even more astounding. Dan Yack for instance; or To the End of the World...

That's my Goodreads review up above, by the way. Feel free to connect with me there if any of you also use that site.
 
I'm about to start reading Valencia by James Nulick. It looks quite good.

"The prose of Valencia is delicately simple yet densely poetic. Its voice is haunting. I couldn't help being reminded by every line I read in James Nulick's novel of Garcia Lorca's famous 'Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias' and its chilling refrain: At five o'clock in the afternoon."

-- Thomas Ligotti

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http://denniscooper-theweaklings.bl...-world-valencia-nine.html?zx=be70ea54c4821858
 
”I yearn for the impossible. I am dying of the possible. This is my sickness. It is called the inability to breathe.”

Des Esseintes would love Karáseks A Gothic Soul, perhaps the zenith of the decadence. Kirsten Lodge's translation was published earlier this year by Twisted Spoon Press in a very nice hardcover book with artwork by Sascha Schneider.
 
The (primarily British) sub-genre of weird fiction that is called ''folk horror'', exemplified by authors such as Machen, Sarban, Blackwood, Lovecraft, John Buchan, Nigel Kneale, and M.R. James -- and films such as Blood on Satan's Claw and The Wicker Man -- is one of my latest interests; for there truly is some magic atmosphere and quality to the ancient standing stones in our fields, the haunts of the unknowable faeries in times when superstition ruled the hearts of men, and of pagan and Druid worship occurring secretly in times when Christianity holds sway.
A new book on the subject has just been published and released. It is entitled Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, and is the most substantial and exhaustive examination on the subject to date, and features numerous articles by the likes of John Coulthart, Kim Newman, and even an interview by Thomas Ligotti, conducted by Neddal Ayad.
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As I believe was once said of the Italian director, Mario Bava, I should describe myself as ''more heretic than Catholic, more pagan than Christian.'' And for more information on tales of folk-horror, there is an excellent site below:
www.folkhorror.com/
 
I've been reading and enjoying Aickman's Heirs edited by Simon Stranzas.

There is one story that grabbed my attention for completely different reasons.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*












A Change of Season by Nina Allan

I thought this was the best story in the collection. Fantastic story, well written, interesting progression...until the end.



That's when I said, "ermahgerd, wut?"

For me, the ending was terrible. It was as if there were two or three pages missing before the "reveal" The only thing that assuaged my disappointment was the fact that up until the ending I LOVED THE STORY. The ending made one of the better short stories that I've read in years become a freak of nature. No disrespect to Ms. Allan. I may have missed something or didn't quite "get it"

I'm curious to know if anyone else had a similar reaction.
 
O
njhorror said:
I've been reading and enjoying Aickman's Heirs edited by Simon Stranzas.

There is one story that grabbed my attention for completely different reasons.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

A Change of Season by Nina Allan

I thought this was the best story in the collection. Fantastic story, well written, interesting progression...until the end.

That's when I said, "ermahgerd, wut?"

For me, the ending was terrible. It was as if there were two or three pages missing before the "reveal" The only thing that assuaged my disappointment was the fact that up until the ending I LOVED THE STORY. The ending made one of the better short stories that I've read in years become a freak of nature. No disrespect to Ms. Allan. I may have missed something or didn't quite "get it"

I'm curious to know if anyone else had a similar reaction.
Click to expand...

I have just looked back at my own review of this book, and I can see what you mean. I was left unconvinced by the whole of this story, although I enjoyed it.
I also didn't initially realise (my bad memory) that it was a retelling or sequel to RINGING THE CHANGES.
 
Ah, that makes sense.
Wow, RINGING THE CHANGES. I've read it and listened to it on BBC and it never dawned on me. I need to re-read both back to back.
I read it as a stand alone and was left completely unsatisfied by the ending.

The story as a whole appealed to me (I'm a huge fan of FOLK HORROR) but thought that it could have been fleshed out a little more, giving some depth to the village holiday (which came across as slightly awkward) and the events of the previous honeymoon and the relationships came across as rushed and crammed in.
I thought the sense of disquiet was building quite well up until the end, and then . . . ermahgerd, wut?

That said, I will probably look into more fiction by Nina Allan.
 
njhorror said:
Wow, RINGING THE CHANGES. I've read it and listened to it on BBC and it never dawned on me. I need to re-read both back to back.
Click to expand...
If I remember right, Jeremy Dyson's story A Last Look at the Sea is influenced by Ringing the Changes. It's in his first collection Never Trust a Rabbit.
 
The New York Review of Books is Wish-Fulfilling machine:

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Uh-huh:

An NYRB Classics Original Winner of the 2014 PEN Translation Prize Winner of the 2014 Read Russia Prize The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of "Autobiography of a Corpse," and the extraordinary spills out."

And Michael Peppiatt strikes again:

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mhm, Bacon in my flesh.
 
http://www.amazon.com/Dublinesque-Directions-Paperbook-Enrique-Vila-Matas/dp/0811219615/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1450851684&sr=1-1&keywords=dublinesque
 
I think many here will find much merit in the works of Scots novelist and poet, John Burnside. Mr. Burnside's dark, poetical, and eerie novels take the reader to small and lonely towns where it is eternally winter, and where darkness, superstition, and evil lurk in the hearts of every men. His novels feature an intense concentration of atmosphere that almost borders on the supernatural, but without ever venturing into outright supernaturalism -- perhaps ''hauntological'' would be a good word to describe his peculiar kind of novel? To give the neophyte a taste of Mr. Burnside's style and themes:

My headlights scanned the twilight....and I would feel included in....some ancient, pagan existence that had been disguised over the years....in corrupted place names, built over with chapels and supermarkets and wafer-thin housing estates....I thought of it being multiple and hooded, like the genii cucullatii I had read about in a book on pagan Britain: those dark creatures of the verges and borderlands the Romans had adopted....I wanted to know what they meant, those Hooded Ones...what gave them their power....If spirits existed in any form.... they would be like these: impersonal, neutral, rooted in the physical, utterly remote from human concerns.
-- Dumb House.

There is also a magnificent article that Mr. Burnside has written on the haunted and desolate landscapes of subarctic Norway.
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiO2qPxnonLAhXDVxoKHRovDzIQFgg3MAU&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftravel%2F2009%2Foct%2F31%2Fnorway-subarctic-beach-tromso-andenes&usg=AFQjCNHqUmpPpiu8hevQ4NLKhk5um-ULlQ
 
Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

I was thinking of doing a more thorough presentation of the book, after the manner in which I explored History and Utopia some time ago, but I realized how futile it would be. The book consists of meandering paradoxologies in its entirety; it indulges in a counter-intuitive thought process that negates itself, in an orgy of intellectual self-laceration. If Cioran thinks that Nietzsche could best be understood as a "sum of attitudes", Cioran himself could be defined as someone who weaponizes self-reflection in order to cancel himself out of existence. Only lunatics and mystics seem to escape his scorn, since they manage to escape man-made time, that is, history, and exist in a state of pure being, exaggerating those misfortunes that befall all of us.

Trevanian, Shibumi

This might appear to be an idiosynchratic choice, but I honestly think that it is a work of genius. Managing to write a popular adventure story, a best-seller, which is at the same time a parody, a critique and an exemplar of an entire genre is an awe-inspiring accomplishment. I have never read anything else that is simultaneously so utterly ludicrous and so uniquely sublime.
 
This is one of my all-time favorite threads on the internet. I've gotten such satisfying recommendations that I always read new posts.
 
I never realized Tim Burton wrote fiction.

Better or worse than the good lot of his films?
 
It is a poetry book, with drawings by him. It is at least better than Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows. It is pretty funny and girls love it.
 
This is The World of Stainboy, a 2000 Flash-animated web series featuring some of the characters from the book and directed by Tim Burton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1nKVJTTFqA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwzAhzGxjw4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGnIZNokATY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9nioISP8ls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSohMa2KJqk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybEPlwfvvE
 
Does anyone know of any good literature that features hip hop, The music/lifestyle? Preferably Japanese or American...
 
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