In Books

Drowning in Time: The Work of Eric Basso: "His work...shows a concern with the dizzying depths of history."

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Click here for a complete selection of Eric Basso’s books. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” — James Joyce, Ulysses Stephen Daedalus’s statement, a quintessentially modern lament, could serve as a fitting epigraph for a number of Eric Basso’s pieces. His work, whether in dramatic (The Golem Triptych), novelistic (Bartholomew Fair), analytic (Decompositions) or short (The Beak Doctor) […]

M. John Harrison’s Black Houses: "Let's give up language..."

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1. Occasionally, if you read voraciously enough, you will encounter a story with the power to change your life. For me, M. John Harrison’s “Black Houses” is just such a story. “Black Houses” is a perfectly crafted missive, a weapon aimed straight at the heart – so darkly comic and fiercely erotic that you might not notice its destructive […]

Stories in the Key of Strange: A Collage of Encounters, Featuring Leena Krohn's Tainaron

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1. More and more, I find myself attracted to innovative writing that isn’t afraid to leave great gaps within itself, that doesn’t try to stick the world onto a postage stamp, but rather puts a postage stamp in the middle of the world’s unfathomable complexities. There was Leena Krohn’s short “sort-of novel” Tainaron, a book that I preferred to various […]

Is China Miéville a Weird Gateway Drug?

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I arrived to China Miéville mania pretty late in the game. I remember how it happened clearly though. It was spring of 2008; the only reason I recall the approximate date was because it marked either the beginning or the middle of my final undergraduate travails. Ah yes, that brief, tumultuous pocket of time when you feel, […]

Bruno Schulz: An Introduction

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 Elsewhere on Weirdfictionreview.com, you can read Schulz’s story “The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hour Glass” and an interview with translator John Curran Davis about Schulz. Born in 1892, Bruno Schulz grew up in his parents’ mercantile shop, a Baroque and labyrinthine building on the market square of the provincial Galician town of Drohobycz. His […]

Weirdfictionreview.com’s 101 Weird Writers: #1 – Bob Leman: A Window into the Work of an Underrated Story Writer

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This is the first of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. Every Tuesday and Thursday, Weirdfictionreview.com will feature a different writer. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts. Bob Leman (1922 — 2006) was an American science […]