As Jacques-Stephen Alexis articulated in Paris, 1956 at the first International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, the Caribbean has always been a crossroads of civilizations, even before its multifarious encounters with Europe after Columbus. Published in the quarterly magazine Présence Africaine in the same year, Alexis’ piece “Du Réalisme Merveilleux des Haïtiens” covered a wide range […]
“The plague takes slumbering images and latent disorder, and suddenly propels them into the most extreme movements. The theater, too, takes gestures and drives them to an extreme; like the plague, it reforges the chain between what is and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible and what has been materialized in nature…” […]
I confess I know little, and almost all of it circumstantial, about this atmospheric sketch of a gutter-dwelling worm. It was written by André Bay (1916−2013), for more than four decades a senior editor at Éditions Stock. Among the diverse writers he championed there were Jorge Amado, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Wolfe, Anaïs Nin, and Virginia Woolf. His […]
This June, Brumfield’s Gallery in Boise, ID (USA) will be running an exhibit devoted to the kind of art that our readers might find dark, weird, or grotesque – in other words, appealing. “Gothic Fiction and the Dark Romantics” will be devoted to featuring the work of artists who are already familiar to WFR – […]
This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts. Marc Laidlaw (1960 – ) is an eclectic American writer of science fiction and horror whose long career has included […]
I was in 10th grade French and on a daylong field trip to see The Phantom of the Opera when they shuffled us, winter-bundled, into that narrow storefront of the Librairie de France at Rockefeller Plaza, with its vestibule full of Madeleine and Babar for the children of the Upper East Side. Clown eyes peered from […]
This week marks the release of my new novel, Annihilation, the first in the Southern Reach trilogy, which documents the effects of Area X, a place cut off from the rest of the world, and the efforts of a secret government agency, the Southern Reach, to figure out Area X’s secrets. This involves sending in expeditions to what […]
This gallery contains 3 photos.
A selection of images from the publishers and others illustrating various aspects of the Southern Reach novels. You can find more information and images at the FSG page and at the very creepy Fourth Estate page for the book – where you can even sign up for an expedition.
Annihilation, the first novel of my Southern Reach series, debuts next week in the U.S., Canada, and Hungary, with the UK edition out in late February and another dozen foreign-language editions to follow — including the Spanish and Hungarian editions showcased below. In Annihilation, the mysterious Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for […]
If the gods of Golden Age of the Belgian School of the Strange are Jean Ray, Thomas Owen, and Franz Hellens, its Silver Age hero is surely Jean Muno. The only child of writer parents, Muno was born Robert Burniaux in a Brussels suburb in 1924 — the year André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto, as Muno […]