Today I discovered the work of Miyu Kojima, a Japanese artist who makes beautifully detailed miniature dioramas of rooms in which people have died lonely deaths, a phenomenon called kodokushi....
Discussion of the work of Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere. I recently saw Arcangelo 1, which is made out of cast wax and animal hides.
Glorious hallucinations that are reminiscent of Calvino's Invisible Cities but also of Borges. Here's an extract:...
One remarkable ancient artefact, a Babylonian world map from the Sixth Century BCE, marks the beginning of this obsession. The map, inscribed on a clay tablet, shows how ancient people imagined the quadrants of the earth: it describes lands of serpents, dragons, and scorpion-men, the far northern regions “where the sun is...
Really thoughtful piece by Dennis Lim on the relationship between ghosts and cinema. Excerpts:...
The world is full of museums that don’t exist fully in three dimensions – museums described in words or drawn on paper; museum catalogues; museums on the web. There are also many museums that are the creation of artists, novelists and poets, and so have a strong thread of imagination running through them. The latter cast an...
Gritty and heartbreaking, this 1970s collection from the master of gekiga, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, was published in English in 2006....
November is coming, and you know what that means… National Novel Generation Month!...
Have fun storming the castle!...
It can't rain all the time....
Opening Statement of Mr. Harold Schoff, attorney for Mr. Coyote: My client, Mr. Wile E. Coyote, a resident of Arizona and contiguous states, does hereby bring suit for damages against the Acme Company, manufacturer and retail distributor of assorted merchandise, incorporated in Delaware and doing business in every state,...
It rains a lot, up here; there are winter days when it doesn’t really get light at all, only a bright, indeterminate gray. But then there are days when it’s like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sunlit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God’s own movie. It was like that the day her...
During her many years of teaching introduction to fiction courses, Ann Charters developed an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom. She also discovered that writers, not editors, have the most interesting and useful things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction....
One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach - all the damn vampires....
I looked across the room, and there was Dr. Martin Luther King walking towards me with this big grin on his face. He reached out to me and said, 'Yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan.' He said that Star Trek was the only show that he, and his wife Coretta, would allow their three little children to stay up and watch. [She...
The Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival returns for 2023 with 135 films selected for screening October 9 through the 15th. SciFi fans from around the world are welcomed to join this one-of-a-kind event as all films will be made available online for streaming and rating through Brooklyn SciFi's Netflix style festival platform....
In the depths of the mutant rain forest where the water falls each afternoon in a light filtered to vermilion, a feline stone idol stands against the opaque foliage....
At dawn he arose and stepped out onto the patio for his first look at Alexandria, the one city he had not yet seen. That year the five cities were Chang-an, Asgard, New Chicago, Timbuctoo, Alexandria: the usual mix of eras, cultures, realities. He and Gioia, making the long flight from Asgard in the distant north the night...
Chick Tracts are booklets meant to convert the reader to christianity by any means possible: guilt, doubt, threat, etc. They are often sexist, racist, homophobic, and so on. Nevertheless, they are an fascinating example of effective propaganda....
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?"...
Sir, the truth is, I talk to God all the time, and, no offense, but He never mentioned you....
The most fascinating, and daunting, aspect of selecting material for an anthology titled The Year's Best Fantasy is that the field of fantasy is as broad and transmutable as the whole field of literature. In American publishing today we have a genre called Adult Fantasy, which evolved after J. R. R. Tolkien’s...
In spite of its ominous literary associations, 1984 proved to be a rather quiet year for SF. There were no major scandals like 1983’s infamous Great Timescape Fiasco, no SF lines driven into oblivion by corporate greed and shortsightedness, no major editorial shakeups … but if you looked closely enough, in the right places,...
The Timewave Explorer is a web-based application for exploring Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero....
