Description
Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
American Supernatural Tales is the ultimate collection of weird and frightening American short fiction. As Stephen King will attest, the popularity of the occult in American literature has only grown since the days of Edgar Allan Poe. The book 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. This volumes also includes "The Yellow Sign," the most horrific story from The King in Yellow, the classic horror collection by Robert W. Chambers featured on HBO's hit TV series True Detective. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good collection of stories.
Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro’s favorites, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ray Russell’s short story “Sardonicus,” considered by Stephen King to be “perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written,” to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and stories by Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Ted Klein, and Robert E. Howard. Featuring original cover art by Penguin Art Director Paul Buckley, these stunningly creepy deluxe hardcovers will be perfect additions to the shelves of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and paranormal aficionados everywhere.
About the Author
Sunand Tryambak Joshi is an Indian American literary scholar, and a leading figure in the study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and other authors. Besides what some critics consider to be the definitive biography of Lovecraft(H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, 1996), Joshi has written about Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, Lord Dunsany, and M.R. James, and has edited collections of their works.His literary criticism is notable for its emphases upon readability and the dominant worldviews of the authors in question; hisThe Weird Talelooks at six acknowledged masters of horror and fantasy (namely Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Dunsany, M. R. James, Bierce and Lovecraft), and discusses their respective worldviews in depth and with authority. A follow-up volume,The Modern Weird Tale, examines the work of modern writers, including Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, T. E. D. Klein and others, from a similar philosophically oriented viewpoint.The Evolution of the Weird Tale(2004) includes essays on Dennis Etchison, L. P. Hartley, Les Daniels, E. F. Benson, Rudyard Kipling, David J. Schow, Robert Bloch, L. P. Davies, Edward Lucas White, Rod Serling, Poppy Z. Brite and others.Joshi is the editor of the small-press literary journals Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction, published by Necronomicon Press. He is also the editor ofLovecraft Annualand co-editor ofDead Reckonings, both small-press journals published by Hippocampus Press.In addition to literary criticism, Joshi has also edited books on atheism and social relations, includingDocuments of American Prejudice(1999), an annotated collection of American racist writings;In Her Place(2006), which collects written examples of prejudice against women; andAtheism: A Reader(2000), which collects atheistic writings by such people as Antony Flew, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, Gore Vidal and Carl Sagan, among others.An Agnostic Reader, collecting pieces by such writers as Isaac Asimov, John William Draper, Albert Einstein, Frederic Harrison, Thomas Henry Huxley, Robert Ingersoll, Corliss Lamont, Arthur Schopenhauer and Edward Westermarck, was published in 2007.Joshi is also the author ofGod's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong(2003), an anti-religious polemic against various writers including C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley, Jr., William James, Stephen L. Carter, Annie Dillard, Reynolds Price, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Guenter Lewy, Neale Donald Walsch and Jerry Falwell, which is dedicated to theologian and fellow Lovecraft critic Robert M. Price.In 2006 he publishedThe Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting It Wrong, which criticised the political writings of such commentators as William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, David and Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly, William Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving and William Kristol, arguing that, despite the efforts of right-wing polemicists, the values of the American people have become steadily more liberal over time.Joshi, who lives with his wife in Moravia, New York, has stated on his website that his most noteworthy achievements thus far have been his biography of Lovecraft,H. P. Lovecraft: A LifeandThe Weird Tale.
0
0
