S. T. Joshi

Baltimore native Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was an essayist, literary critic, magazine editor, novelist, and journalist. Starting as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald at the turn of the century, Mencken eventually became associated with the Baltimore Sun and his work for the newspaper spanned five decades. In H.L. Mencken: An Annotated Bibliography, S.T. Joshi provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive bibliography of the writings of H. L. Mencken ever assembled. It presents detailed information on his book publications from 1903 to the present, with a full list of editions and reprints. Most significantly, it presents for the first time a comprehensive annotated listing of his magazine and newspaper work (including more than 1,500 anonymous editorials for the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Evening Sun, and other papers, which have never been listed in any previous bibliographies), a thorough index to his book reviews, and a full list of interviews Mencken gave during his lifetime. Word counts of nearly every item in the bibliography have been supplied, and the book has been thoroughly indexed by name, title, and periodical. Because every item has been annotated, scholars and students can, for the first time, gain an idea of the subject-matter of all Mencken's writings, especially his magazine and newspaper work. The indexes will allow users to locate any given item with ease. The chronological arrangement of each section allows users to understand the growth and development of Mencken's work, making this volume an invaluable resource.

Ambrose Bierce is well known to readers as the author of The Devil's Dictionary (1906) and numerous short stories, such as the Civil War tales gathered in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and the horror stories collected in Can Such Things Be? (1893). But, in his own day, he was best known as a prolific and fearless jounalist, and in the 40 years of his literary career he wrote thousands of articles for newspapers and magazines in San Francisco, London, and elsewhere. Most of the articles and poems that Bierce published in his own 12-volume Collected Works (1909-12) first appeared in his newspaper columns, as did his celebrated tales. With the growing scholarly interest in Bierce, these contributions are eliciting more attention.This bibliography is the first to attempt an exhaustive catalog of Bierce's entire body of published work. While the volume includes a chapter of separate publications by Bierce, such as individual books, its most important feature is a chapter listing entries for his contributions to books and periodicals. These entries identify the first appearances of his stories, articles, and poems. An additional chapter lists reprints of his works, and the volume also provides information about manuscript holdings. Joshi and Schultz demonstrate that in addition to being a master short story writer, fabulist, and epigrammatist, Bierce may also have been the leading American journalist of the 19th century.

H. P. Lovecraft was one of the most well-read authors of his time, and his personal library constitutes an intimate glimpse into his mind and imagination. This fifth revised edition provides comprehensive information on 1129 books owned by Lovecraft.These books focus chiefly on four key areas that Lovecraft found particularly fascinating: ancient literature and history; the history and antiquities of New England; astronomy, chemistry, and other sciences; and, of course, the literature of weird fiction. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have supplied full publication information, tables of contents for many titles, data on Lovecraft's discussions of the volumes in his stories, essays, poems, and letters, and a wealth of other information. To know Lovecraft's mind, one must first know his books.In this updated edition, forty-four new titles have been added to the list of books owned by Lovecraft, and additional information has been supplied on all titles listed.

For more than four decades, S. T. Joshi has been a prominent figure in the field of weird fiction-as author, editor, scholar, and reviewer. He is chiefly known for his work on H. P. Lovecraft, and he has prepared corrected and annotated editions of Lovecraft's fiction, poetry, essays, and letters, along with such critical and biographical studies as H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990) and I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). Joshi has also written pioneering criticism of the entire range of weird fiction, in such books as The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). He has compiled editions of such leading authors of weird fiction as Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Machen. In addition, he has written some of the most incisive reviews in the field, as well as a small but choice array of detective and horror fiction. This compilation presents a full bibliography of Joshi's 300 books, along with lists of his articles, reviews, fiction, and poetry, along with an introduction that provides an overview of Joshi's work. This is the essential guide to one of the most prolific and influential authors in the field.

During his more than four decades as a critic, editor, and reviewer in the field of weird fiction, S. T. Joshi has repeatedly been the subject of a wide range of interviews. As the leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Joshi has given dozens of interviews in which he recounts his work on this controversial author-restoring the texts of Lovecraft's works, assessing the major themes and motifs in his writings, gauging his wide influence on subsequent literature and on popular culture. In addition, Joshi's all-encompassing study of weird fiction has led to interviews on Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, and other leading writers. As an anthologist, Joshi has recounted his compilation of the Black Wings series and other volumes of weird fiction. Beyond this field, Joshi has made lasting contributions in the study of atheism, politics, and the work of H. L. Mencken. This volume reprints for the first time forty interviews that Joshi has given from 1989 to 2019. In addition, there are a handful of autobiographical essays in which Joshi tells of his early fascination with Lovecraft and his life as an atheist and critic. For anyone interested in the life and work of S. T. Joshi, this is an invaluable volume.

After two centuries of literary and pop culture procreation, Victor Frankenstein and his monster are as virile as ever: synthetic biology, genetically modified organisms, artificial intelligence, the creation of one life at the cost of others. On the threshold of the third century, we stand on unforeseen shores of deep, far-reaching scientific and technological waters. And yet no truth-told tale is ever far from the sublime, the supernatural, the interior. The alchemy of art is always central to the story. In the case of Mary Shelley's masterpiece, the lives of those involved in its making were as dramatic and mysterious as any character from literature. In 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, lover and future wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, conceived the idea for Frankenstein during a summer of darkness. Within a few years of the novel's publication, three of the members involved in its conception were dead. Suicide, premature death, and tragedy are as woven into the tale as the words themselves. Frankenstein is at heart the story of a very misguided "parent" whose destructive offspring outlives him both in the novel and in our collective imagination. Ambition divorced from responsibility; genius wedded to derangement; the creator who rejects his own creation so fully he will not even give it a name. It is a tale of monsters and their monstrosities; it is thus also, of course, a very human tale, and one that continues to be written. Featuring artwork from award-winning artist Robert Payne Cabeen, this collection brings together two hundred years' worth of monstrous birthings: facts and fictions, lore and lunacy from the underground laboratories where monsters are both born and made.

For close to two decades, S. T. Joshi has been one of the leading authorities on H. L. Mencken, the fiery journalist and critic whose vibrant writings-books, magazine articles, and thousands of newspaper pieces-continue to engage readers and critics of American literature. Because he has read the entirety of Mencken's bountiful output, he is in a unique position to study those aspects of Mencken's work that others have ignored. In particular, Joshi has shown how Mencken, in addition to bring a brilliant social and literary critic, also wrote dozens of poems, short stories, and plays (including the full-length farce Heliogabalus); and in several essays in this book he displays the value of this material. Other essays discuss Mencken as a longtime book reviewer, as a scourge of religious obscurantism, as an autobiographer, and other topics. Throughout these essays, Joshi displays his familiarity with Mencken's life, writings, and the intellectual and cultural era in which he wrote.

spellbinding tales, including "The Sin Eater," by Fiona McLeod, "The Eye Above the Mantel," by Frank Belknap Long, as well as renowned works by R. H. Barlow, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, W. C. Morrow and eight other masters of the genre.

As Stephen King will attest , the popularity of the occult in American literature has only grown since the days of Edgar Allan Poe. American Supernatural Tales celebrates the richness of this tradition with chilling contributions from some of the nation’s brightest literary lights, including Poe himself, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and—of course— Stephen King. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good addition to Penguin Classics.

The leading critic of supernatural literature here examines the roots of the "weird tale" (as Lovecraft called it) through detailed examinations of five "founding fathers" of the genre: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and H.P. Lovecraft. The result is a thorough study of the art, craft, philosophy, and aesthetics of an enduring genre of fantastic literature.

The leading critic of supernatural literature here examines the roots of the "weird tale" (as Lovecraft called it) through detailed examinations of five "founding fathers" of the genre: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and H.P. Lovecraft. The result is a thorough study of the art, craft, philosophy, and aesthetics of an enduring genre of fantastic literature.

The Irish writer Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) has suffered a regrettable decline in critical esteem. Although one of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers of the early 20th century, he seems to have fallen out of fashion with both the Irish critical community and with enthusiasts of fantasy literature. But Dunsany was one of the critical figures in modern fantasy, a significant influence on Tolkien, Le Guin, and other writers. His own work, written over a 50-year span and covering nearly every literary mode (short story, novel, play, essay, poem), is itself rich with meaning. In this, the first academic study of Dunsany's work, Joshi establishes that Dunsany has a remarkable grasp of the symbolic function of fantasy, and that he used fantasy, horror, and the supernatural as metaphors for his most deeply held convictions on life and society. His entire work is unified by a single overriding theme—the need for human reunification with the natural world—even though this theme takes on many different forms (e.g., scorn of industrialization, demonstration of the moral superiority of animals over human beings, rumination on the extinction of the human race). The course of Dunsany's long career—proceeding from early short stories and plays about the edge of the world to full-length novels to tales of comic fantasy (such as the popular Jorkens stories) to sensitive works about Ireland—reveals a writer constantly searching for new ways to express his central philosophic and aesthetic conceptions. Joshi's volume may best be described as an exercise in literary excavation—an attempt to unearth an unjustly forgotten writer and to show that his work is in need of further study and analysis.

In this second volume of his expansive history of atheism, S. T. Joshi examines the major trends in the last four centuries. The Scientific Revolution, culminating in the work of Galileo and Newton, expressed an increasing awareness of the natural functioning of the universe without the intervention of a god. In spite of the emergence of major religious figures in philosophy (Descartes, Spinioza) and literature (Pascal, Milton, Bunyan), the trend was toward secularism. This trend erupted in the French Enlightenment in the 18th century, with such titans as Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume, some of whom were the first explicit atheists in Western history. In the 19th century, biblical criticism and the advance of science (especially Darwin's theory of evolution) destroyed the remaining intellectual pillars supporting religion. This work reached a pinnacle in the 20th century, when atheism and secularism flourished in such figures as Russell, Einstein, and, at the beginning of the 21st century, the New Atheists. Joshi traces all these issues in detail, consulting a vast array of sources to portray a Western civilization where secularism is now the dominant mode of thought and action.

A man plagued by nightmarish visions seeks help in Miskatonic University's library of forbidden books, where, in the dreaded Necronomicon, he finds clues in legends of elder magic in "The Dreams in the Witch House," the title story in an anthology containing more than twenty chilling tales of terror from the master of the macabre. Original.

Atheism has been on the rise in the West for several decades, but its roots, including those belonging to secularism, agnosticism, and freethought, run deep in Western history, philosophy, and thought. Drawing on a multitude of sources from a number of disciplines, S. T. Joshi outlines the natural origins of religious belief in primitive times and charts the slow development of secular accounts of natural phenomena in the Greco-Roman world. Adopting the “ Christ myth” theory, he surveys the emergence of a new faith— Christianity— that grew out of Judaism and explores its evolution through the medieval period. He then examines the increasing schisms within the church and conflicts between religious and political entities that caused a fracturing of the monolith of Christianity and the birth of the Renaissance, which not only brought to light the literary glories of the Greco-Roman world but also led to a scientific resurgence and the development of a secular view of the cosmos. By the end of the sixteenth century, as he concludes, the stage was set for the emergence of a worldview free of religion.

In less than a decade, Katherine Kerestman has established herself as a vibrant new voice in weird fiction. Drawing upon the classic work of Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, and others, she infuses her writing with lush, richly textured prose, a keen sensitivity to the strange and bizarre, and an ability to transform venerable motifs into something new and fresh.Kerestman has made a specialty of the short-short story-a most difficult form to master. In this volume of more than thirty tales, sketches, and vignettes, she writes of vampires, witches, the mysterious antics of cats, and other spectral creatures that disrupt the fabric of our commonplace existence.Houses, castles, and other dwellings are of particular fascination to Kerestman, and some of her most gripping tales are set in domiciles that should be havens of security for their occupants but prove to be very different, and very dangerous, places.

Table of ContentsEvenson Collection Well Worth Reading ........... Tony FonsecaBrian Evenson, None of You Shall Be Spared.Two Authors, Art, High Weirdness, and Being Down-and-Out on the Streets of California ........... G za A. G. ReillyRobert Guffey, Cryptopolis and Other Stories.An Excellent End to Handheld Press: The House of Silence Daniel PietersenE. Nesbit, The House of Silence: Ghost Stories, 1887-1920.Ramsey's Rant: The Unsuitable ........... Ramsey CampbellThe Cosmic Imagination of Charles Loring Jackson ........... Katherine Kerestman\On Loring's The Gold Point and Other Strange Stories.R. H. Barlow and Lovecraft's Literary Legacy ........... Donald Sidney-FryerMarcos Legaria, L'Affaire Barlow: H. P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy.GhouLunatics in Their Own Write ........... The joey ZoneRoger Hill, The Chillingly Weird Art of Matt Fox.To Kneel and Kneel Before Great Chaugnar's Fane ........... Martin AnderssonFrank Belknap Long, When Chaugnar Wakes: The Collected Poetry and Other Works of Frank Belknap Long.At Play in Lovecraftian Fields ........... G za A. G. ReillyEzra Claverie, The Shadow out of Providence: A Lovecraftian MetatextAs Worthy a Search as the Searcher ........... G za A. G. ReillyLeigh Blackmore, Nightmare Logic: Tales of the Macabre, Fantastic, & CthulhuesqueEmotional Landscapes ........... David PeakSimon Strantzas, Only the Living Are Lost.A Stuart Gordon Afterworld ........... Michael D. MillerSuitable Flesh, dir. Joe Lynch.Variations on a Dream ........... Clint SmithAdam Golaski, Stone Gods.Living and Loving on a Pestilential Planet ........... Katherine KerestmanOn H. A. Manhood's Nightseed and Other Tales.John Martin Leahy and the Lost Race Adventure Tale ........... S. T. JoshiSome Bodies: Words about Allison V. Harding, "The Underbody," and Such ........... Alex HoustounThe Underbody ........... Allison V. HardingWeird Tales from Peru ........... Darrell SchweitzerClemente Palma, Malevolent Tales and Malignant Stories.About the Contributors