Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

24 marzo 1897 

Provo un certo imbarazzo nel pormi a scrivere, come se mettessi a nudo la mia anima, per ordine – no, perdio! diciamo su suggerimento – di un ebreo tedesco (o austriaco, ma fa lo stesso).  Chi sono?  Forse è più utile interrogarmi sulle mie passioni che sui fatti della mia vita.  Chi amo?  Non mi vengono in mente volti amati.  So che amo la buona cucina:  al solo pronunciare il nome de La Tour d'Argent provo come un fremito per tutto il corpo.  È amore? 

Chi odio?  Gli ebrei, mi verrebbe da dire, ma il fatto che stia cedendo così servilmente alle istigazioni di quel dottore austriaco (o tedesco) dice che non ho nulla contro i maledetti ebrei. 

Degli ebrei so solo ciò che mi ha insegnato il nonno:  – Sono il popolo ateo per eccellenza, mi istruiva.  Partono dal concetto che il bene deve realizzarsi qui, e non oltre la tomba.  Quindi operano solo per la conquista di questo mondo. (p. 11)

March 24, 1897

I feel a certain embarrassment in having to write, as if my soul were laid bare, at the order – no, for God's sake! we say at the suggestion – of a German Jew (or Austrian, it is the same).  Who am I?  Perhaps it is of more use to interrogate me over my passions which are the facts of my life.  Who do I love?  The faces of lovers do not pass through my mind.  I know that I love good cooking:  only pronounce the name of the La Tour d'Argent to prove how a shiver runs throughout my body.  Is it love? 

Who do I hate?  The Jews, I would like to say, but the fact that I have acceded so servilely to the instigations of that Austrian doctor (or German) says to me that I have nothing against those damned Jews. 

Of the Jews I know what my grandfather taught me:  "They are an atheistic people par excellence," he instructed.  They believe that good ought to be completed here and not beyond the tomb.  Therefore they operate only for the conquest of this world. (Translation is my own; rough draft)

Umberto Eco's novels often contain a mixture of the arcane and the profane; in his recent non-fiction book, This is Not the End of the Book, he references in a transcribed conversation with Jean-Claude Carrière his love for books that contain errata.  After dealing with conspiracy theories (Foucault's Pendulum), deliberate distortions of history (Baudolino), lost knowledge (The Name of the Rose), strange orderings of the world (The Island of the Day Before) and the frailties of memory (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana), perhaps it is no surprise that Eco has turned toward exploring that seamy underbelly of late 19th century European anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.  The Prague Cemetery, like its predecessors, is much more than just a look at the nationalistic mutation of anti-Semitism; it attempts to portray a civilization just prior to its violent collapse that views itself as being enlightened while its actions show otherwise.  For many, to even touch upon such a topic is too outre for their liking; the Vatican's official newspaper strongly condemned the novel upon its Italian release last year for the possibility of persuading readers that the vile anti-Semitic conspiracies contained within might have a kernel of truth to them.  Strange things happen when tales are told from the antagonist's point of view, among them otherwise sensible critics often missing the entire point of the novel.

At first glance, The Prague Cemetery is told through the perspective of its main first-person narrator, Simone Simonini, a master forger whose adventures stretch back from the literary present of 1897 to the immediate aftermath of the 1830 July Revolution in France.  Through his narration, full of malice and deceit, we are presented with a fractured, stained portrait of revolutionary 19th century France and Italy.  We experience Simonini's suspicion and hatred of the Jesuits (who, after the Jews, were often at the nefarious center of most conspiracy theory webs), of the conservative elements in Italy, the struggles within the Risorgimento, and behind it all, his growing and mutating hatred of Jews.  The historical 19th century saw the change in anti-Semitic sentiment from a religious-based antipathy (that the Jews were the accursed Christkillers) to a nationalist view, tempered by the emerging Social Darwinist belief in racial "survival of the fittest," in which the Jews are extra-national and thus in a world beset by a growing arms race between the dominant industrial powers (Britain, Germany, France, Austria, and to an extent Russia) they are seen as a wild card who may tilt the balance of power against any of the powers in whose fatherlands they might dwell.

Looking back on this period through the lens of the Holocaust, we may shake our heads in bafflement that such an odious ideology ever gained ground in a century full of other, more attractive "-isms" such as positivism and rationalism, yet it is that cultural/philosophical hypocrisy that makes this period so fascinating to historians and to erudite individuals such as Eco.  How willingly people self-deceive!  It is this that intrigues Eco and it is through Simonini's rantings and the other, briefer accounts given by a an anonymous third narrator and the letters of a Jesuit priest, Abbé Dalla Piccola, that these hypocrisies are laid bare.

Yet one has to be cautious when reading any of Eco's fiction, as he often seeks to play around with conceptual understandings in order to explore why falsehoods are so attractive to people.  It is rather trite to say that Simonini (and the other narrators) is an "unreliable narrator;" he is very reliable in as far as his viewpoint of the world never changes.  It is the reader who becomes the subject of unreliability here; we are, after all, notoriously inclined to swallow whole what a narrator might imply until the implications of such make us do a 180° and refute what we had earlier held as truth, despite the narrator not changing his stance at all.  This sense of narrative deceit can be unappealing to many readers; my first read of The Prague Cemetery last year left me feeling underwhelmed and a bit discomfited by what I had read and to what I reacted, yet a re-read recently led me to reassess this work.

The Prague Cemetery is not by any stretch of the imagination an "easy" or "accessible" work.  It requires the reader to be inquisitive, to ask questions, and to learn some unsettling facets of 19th century European social, cultural, and political history in order to delve further into the world that culminated with the infamous 1905 publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (as well as understanding the milieu that produced that "Austrian doctor" alluded to in the translated passage above).  For some, this is not an enjoyable task, but for those readers who do know something of these topics and who are willing to sift through the intentional false leads and deceptive commentaries embedded in this novel, The Prague Cemetery may yield surprising results.

2011 National Book Award YA nominee: Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now

There aren't too many things around that are whole, you know.  You look hard at most anything, and it's probably beat up somewhere or other.  Beat up, or dinged up, or missing a piece, or tattooed.  Or maybe something starts out whole and then it turns into junk, like Joe Pepitone's cap getting rained on in a gutter somewhere.  Probably you can't even tell it's a cap anymore.  Probably you wouldn't even want to pick it up if you saw it.  But it didn't start that way.  It started as Joe Pepitone's cap, and when he was out in the field, the sun was beating down on it from above the stands of Yankee Stadium and he could smell the grass and the dirt of the infield beneath its brim. 

When you find something that's whole, you do what you can to keep it that way. 

And when you find something that isn't, then maybe it's not a bad idea to try to make it whole again.  Maybe.

Capturing the voice and feel of what today we might label as a "troubled youth" or "at-risk adolescent" is very difficult.  What they project to others is going to vary based on learned behaviors associated with what protects them from pain and suffering and which might provide either the best reward or at least the mitigation of punishment.  In this loose sequel to his Newberry Award-winning Wednesday Wars, Gary D. Schmidt attempts of the most difficult narrative tasks, the portrayal of such a youth, the recently-transplanted eighth grade student, Doug Swieteck, as he learns to open up adults outside his family.  It is an ambitious goal, one in which he largely succeeds.

Okay for Now is told through Doug's point-of-view.  We get glimpses at his tumultuous home life, with a belligerent and sometimes border-psychotic father; the put-upon mother who learns to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to Doug's struggles; an absent eldest brother, Lucas, who is serving in Vietnam (the story is set in the late 1960s); and a bullying middle brother who is canny enough to avoid attracting unwanted interest when it comes to doling out pain to his little brother.  Add to that Doug's reading disability and his learned aggressiveness (seen more in Wednesday Wars, of which I've only read the included excerpt) and it would be easy for any erstwhile teacher or other adult to leave Doug, like his lost Joe Pepitone-signed Yankee cap, moldering in a metaphorical gutter, devoid of hope for any sort of rehabilitation.

Yet some do see hope for Doug.  We see teachers at his new school realize that he is more than a smaller copy of his brother Christopher.  We see Doug's fascination with an old Audubon book of bird illustrations (each chapter of Okay for Now begins with one of these illustrations and Doug's commentary on how each bird relates to elements of his life) and how some of his teachers come to realize his potential and to see to the core of his academic issues.  This very easily could have been a mawkish display, similar to those plague of "heroic teacher fights against ignorance and violence to make those poor, pitiable teens become something" stories that make someone feel good about "making a difference" without ever really coming to understand those children in the first place.  Although there are occasions where it seems Schmidt tries to cram in too many of these examples of compassionate adults, he wisely banishes these to the sidelines and lets Doug speak for himself, struggle to find himself, with immense payoffs at the novel's end.

Schmidt's narrative is compelling, not just because it rings true for me as a teacher of "at risk" and "emotionally disturbed" children for several years, but because it illustrates the hope that these students have without ever dismissing or diminishing the thorny issues they face.  Schmidt shows Doug's continuing family issues and how they evolve over time in a way that feels natural and not overdone.  He reveals through Doug's matter-of-fact style of narration how Doug learns to love to learn literature such as Jane Eyre and to relate to the characters despite the fact that his hitherto-undiagnosed learning disability in reading makes it very difficult for me to learn any other way than to listen to the instructor.  Scenes such as this strike an emotional chord for me, as I have seen such unlikely epiphanies and these are transformative for students and teachers alike.  That Schmidt manages to keep Doug's story grounded and not to over-emphasize such "breakthroughs" is a testament to his understanding of his protagonist's background and the struggles that remain.  Okay for Now certainly is a fitting title for what we see unfold in this novel.

At first, I was skeptical that Schmidt could capture these little breakthroughs without blowing them out of proportion.  As the story continued, I changed from being distrusting of the story's basic premise to becoming quite curious about what might happen next.  Okay for Now remains true to itself and to its source material.  It is a novel that readers from middle school on up can read and discuss for some time to come.  Perhaps my greatest compliment is my desire, if feasible, to purchase a print copy (I read this on my iPad) and leave it in my classroom for my students to discover.  I suspect they are the ones who will have the most to say and I believe they would relate even more to Doug's situation than I, the teacher of several similar youth, ever could.  Certainly worthy of its nomination as a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

2011 National Book Award YA nominee: Albert Marrin, Flesh & Blood So Cheap

Frances Perkins was shaken by what she saw that day.  It was a life-changing experience.  The sight of people jumping from windows affected her so deeply that she vowed such a horror could not, must not, be allowed to happen again.  She would devote the rest of her life to making her vow a reality.  Yet the Triangle Fire is more than a tragedy.  It is part of a larger story, one woven into the very fabric of American life.  Without understanding that larger story, we cannot fully understand the disaster and how it influences us today. (p. 3-4)

March 25, 2011 marked the centenary of the deadliest fire in New York City outside of the infamous 9/11 attacks.  One hundred and forty-six women, most of them newly-arrived immigrants from Italy and Russia, perished in a fire that started on the upper floors of the ten story Asch Building, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company had its center of textile operations.  It is one of the most tragic workplace disasters in American history and it spawned a host of reforms regarding safety codes, factory regulations, and labor laws.  Yet a century later, what really has changed about the sweatshops that used to proliferate in New York City?

In his middle school-aimed history, Flesh & Blood So Cheap, Albert Marrin sets out to explain how these women who died in the fire came to work in a sweatshop such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and how similar economic conditions today have brought the sweatshop model back to the fore of mass manufacturing.  Marrin focuses on the personal stories of those women who immigrated to the United States from Italy and Russia in hopes of escaping either brutal rural poverty (the Italians) or cruel religious pogroms (the Yiddish-speaking Jews from Russia) and how their lives became intertwined with the exploitative textile manufacturing plants such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.  Marrin also mixes in the stories of reformers such as Frances Perkins (the future Secretary of Labor and the first female to hold a Cabinet position), Morris Rosenfeld, Mary Dreier, Al Smith (future governor of New York), among others.

Marrin's narrative is not linear, in part because he aims to show social and cultural connections between the immigrant cultures and today's outsourced sweatshops.  He mixes together not just the personal stories of the people mentioned above, but also those who actively resisted the nascent corporate capitalism that was beginning to dominate American business and politics.  At times, this may be a bit heady for his intended middle school audience, but Marrin does not sugarcoat the perceived inequalities of the sweatshop economic system and its tendency to reduce costs at the expense of safety and decent worker wages.  He frequently uses worker diaries and newspaper accounts of the time to underscore the misery that these textile workers and others in related fields experienced.  This creates an immediate, personal connection to the past that makes Flesh & Blood So Cheap a quick page-turning read.

Yet there are problems with such an approach.  In his creation of a personal narrative, Marrin at times becomes too polemical.  He presents the horrors of sweatshop capitalism without presenting much, if anything, in the way of explanation for how such a system proliferated so quickly in the major cities such as New York City.  Of course, the argument could be made that providing this look might weaken the effectiveness of the narrative he crafted out of the documents of the workers' lives and their deaths, but this near-total omission opens this otherwise well-written and presented non-fiction to the charge that it is sacrificing historical perspective for the sake of sensationalist presentation of a tragic event. 

Despite this, Marrin's book certainly succeeds in its goal of writing a gripping history of the time to which middle school-aged children could read, understand, and relate.  Marrin's connections of past and present present troubling questions for readers young and old alike to consider, especially in regard to the basic structure of our global economy.  Although Flesh & Blood So Cheap does not attempt to be a neutral, "unbiased" history (as if such things can ever exist), it certainly makes an important American historical event appear fresh and vibrant for readers who may not know much about the stimuli leading up to the Fire but who may be interested in reading a history presented as a series of linked personal narratives that could in turn reflect on their own families' lives and experiences.

2011 National Book Award YA nominee, Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again

Deep breaths.

I'm the first student in class.

My new teacher has brown curls
looped tight to her scalp
like circles in a beehive.

She points to her chest:

MiSSS SScott,
saying it three times,
each louder
with every more spit.

I repeat, MiSSS SScott,
careful to hiss every s.

She doesn't seem impressed.

I tap my own chest:
Hà.

She must have heard
ha,
as in funny ha-ha-ha.

She fakes a laugh.

I repeat, Hà,
and wish I knew
enough English
to tell her
to listen for
the diacritical mark,

this one directing the tone downward.

My new teacher tilts
her head back,
fakes
an even sadder laugh.

The space between words and thoughts often is at least as important as the vocalizations that we make.  The right (or wrong) tone, the delicate pause that adds import to a statement or a sense of lightness to a question, can make or break communication.  Languages have their own unique rhythms and cadences that make them much more than the sum of their vocabularies.  Yet when second language acquisition is involved, even the familiar sounds take on new, sometimes confusing connotations.  I taught social studies for two years in Florida's English for Speakers of Other Languages program (it is where I learned much of my Spanish and a smattering of Portuguese and Haitian).  I often would see students who would struggle with how to greet their teachers.  Some would call me "Ms.," thinking that was English for maestro/a.  One student from Costa Rica would silently stick his hand out at the beginning of class for his first month there, as that was the custom there for greeting their instructors.  Some of the confusions were comic; others almost tragic.

Vietnamese-American writer Thanhha Lai in her debut novel-in-poem-form, Inside Out and Back Again, covers in fictional form the very real pains and confusions that she experienced as a fourth grade student uprooted from Saigon during its fall in 1975 and her family's trip to a sponsored refugee home in Alabama.  Utilizing short 1-2 page narrative poems, Lai, through the somewhat autobiographical voice of Hà, explores those gaps in understanding, those caesura where things not said reveal more than those explicitly reveal.  Spanning from one Tet (Vietnamese New Year) to the next (or late January 1975 to late January 1976), Lai reveals so much about Hà's life, the terrible transformations brought forth by being uprooted and placed in an alien, somewhat hostile culture, and the adjustments she and her family makes in order to fit in.

Lai easily could have attempted to write Inside Out and Back Again as a traditional Romansbildung, but Hà's story is much more effective because we experience the pauses, the failed attempts to comprehend then what is happening, the mocking laughter implicit in the few words said to her by her new classmates.  If this book had been written in traditional novel form, we would have had to have more detail, more explanations, which in turn would have lessened the power of this narrative by robbing it of its achingly awkward silences and pauses that compel the reader to consider further the implications of what Hà is narrating.

Some might think that this approach would lessen the characterizations.  Yet the opposite occurs.  In little, seemingly innocuous passages, we come to understand just how complex and dynamic Hà's mother and three older siblings are.  We may smile at learning how brother Vu wants to be like Bruce Lee, until we witness how he intervenes when Hà is threatened by bullies.  Hà's mother, although rarely the center of any of the vignette poems, looms heavily as the wise and canny matriarch of a family whose father disappeared after being captured by the North Vietnamese.  Even the eldest brothers, Khoi and Quang, have interesting personalities that poke up into Hà's narrative on occasion.  Lai does an excellent job in showing how the family, as well as Hà, cope with assimilating into 1970s Southern/American culture.

Inside Out and Back Again is an outstanding read.  There were no longeurs, no places where Hà's narration felt affected, no stilted dialogue.  The prose/poetry felt natural, as if it were the means of expression for a confused, scared immigrant girl trying to make sense of the new culture around her and her place within it.  Inside Out and Back Again ended up being one of my favorite reads in all of the categories for the 2011 National Book Awards and it certainly is one of the best debut novels for 2011.

What again does "YA" entail?

Just a little rumination over the term, as I am almost done reading the entire 2011 National Book Awards shortlist for "Young Persons' Literature."  Over the next few days, likely starting later this afternoon, I am going to be writing reviews of the following books:

Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again

Albert Marrin, Flesh & Blood:  The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy

Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now

Debby Dahl Edwardson, My Name is Not Easy

Franny Billingsley, Chime


I've finished reading the first four and hope to finish the Billingsley tonight or tomorrow at the latest.  I am impressed, as I usually am when I sample recommended YA titles, at the directness and emotional pull of the majority of the tales.  The narrative "rawness" (in the sense of these usually being told from first-person PoVs, with prose shaped to reflect this) usually cuts to the quick and I find that to be a welcome change of pace from my usual fare.  To me at least, the term "Young Adult Literature" seems to indicate tales in which the story motifs, fantastical and naturalistic alike, will appeal strongly to teens (and often to those a generation or two older than that) because the main characters are viewing their environs in similar fashions to what the reader might do in such a situation.

Yet despite my own generally positive views toward this seemingly amorphous field, I do encounter the term being tossed about as a pejorative toward works that do not contain adolescent protagonists nor do such stories contain storylines to which such readers might easily relate.  While it's tempting to sink to the level of that debate and take sides and employ ad hominems, it just wouldn't answer the nagging question of what people mean when they say "YA."

What do you think it means?  If you've read works where such a title might apply, which ones are the better ones that you've encountered in recent years?

A few choice quotes from books I'm currently reading

By forty-two, you have pieced & sewn many things
together in segregated Alabama.  You have heard
"Nigger Gal" more times than you can stitch your
manners down.  You have smelled fear cut through
the air like sulfur iron from the paper mills.  The pants,
shirts, and socks that you have darned perfectly, routinely,
walk perfectly, routinely, by you. (Afternoon.  How do.)
Those moving along so snug in your well-made, well-sewn
clothes, spit routinely, narrowly missing your perfectly
pressed sleeve.

– from "Red Velvet," found in Nikky Finney's 2011 National Book Award nominee for poetry, Head Off & Split

Then, right there at the door, just as they were ready to step across the border into freedom, that crazy Eskimo – Amiq – he raised up one fist, held it tight against his chest, and grinned.  Right at Sonny.  Maybe he thought Father didn't see him, but he was wrong.  Father sees everything.

Before they could even move, Father flew to the corner and grabbed the two-by-four.  Sonny felt the force of it cracking against Amiq's bones as if against his own.  But Amiq just stood there, his back bent to Father's blows, staring at the door to freedom, smiling.

– from Debby Dahl Edwardson's My Name is not Easy, 2011 National Book Award nominee for YA

In that memorable year when the famous Berlin wall came down, a corpse was discovered in the Tiergarten not far from the graying marble statue of Queen Louise.  This happened a few days before Christmas.

The corpse was that of a well-groomed man of about fifty, and everything he wore or had on him appeared to be of better quality.  At first glance a gentleman of some consequence, a banker or a senior manager.  Snow was falling slowly, but it was not very cold, so the flakes melted on the paths of the park; only the blades of grass retained a white edge.  The investigators did everything by the book and, because of the weather conditions, worked quickly.  They closed off the area and proceeding clockwise in a narrowing spiral course searched it thoroughly so they could record and secure all existing clues.  Behind an improvised screen of black plastic sheets, they carefully undressed the corpse but found no signs indicating suicide.

– from Péter Nádas' Parallel Stories

I've confessed to everything and I'd like to be hanged.

Now, if you please.

I don't mean to be difficult, but I can't bear to tell my story.  I can't relive those memories – the touch of the Dand Hand, the smell of eel, the gulp and swallow of the swamp.

How can you possibly think me innocent?  Don't let my face fool you; it tells the worst lies.  A girl can have the face of an angel but have a horrid sort of heart.

I know you believe you're giving me a chance – or, rather, it's the Chime Child giving me the chance.  She's desperate, of course, not to hang an innocent girl again, but please believe me:  Nothing in my story will absolve me of guilt.  It will only prove what I've already told you, which is that I'm wicked.

– from Franny Billingsley's Chime, 2011 National Book Award nominee for YA

There are several ways of responding to the person who comes into your house, notices your impressive library and can only think to ask, "Have you read them all?"  One of my friends used to say, "And more, my dear sir, and more."

Personally, I've two replies.  The first:  "No.  These are just the books I'm planning to read next week.  The one's I've already read are at the university."  The second:  "I haven't read any of these books.  Why would I keep them, otherwise?"  There are of course more contentious responses, if you're willing to further antagonize and even anger your guest.  The truth is that we all own dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands (in the case of an extensive library) of books that we haven't read.  And yet when we eventually pick them up, we find that they are already familiar.  How is that?  How do we already know the books that we haven't read?  Firstly, there's the esoteric explanation – there are these waves that somehow travel from the book to you – to which I don't subscribe.  Secondly, perhaps it's not true that you've never opened the book; over the years you're bound to have moved it from place to place, and may in the process have flicked through it and forgotten that you've done so.  Thirdly, over the years you've read lots of books that have mentioned this one and so made it seem familiar.  There are thus several ways to know something of books that we haven't read.  Which is a good thing – otherwise how would one ever find time to read the same book four times?

– from Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière's This is Not the End of the Book


Hopefully, some or all of these quotes will lead you to pick up a copy and read.  Hard reading decisions for the next few days.

Weird Fiction Review launched today

I said in passing a few months ago that I would be help providing content for a new site.  Well, that new site, Weird Fiction Review, launched today.  Below is the press release (and links) that go with it:

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR WEIRD?

Weirdfictionreview.com: Your Non-Denominational Source for The Weird


Weirdfictionreview.com launched today, a website devoted to The Weird and created by Luis Rodrigues. The project is the brainchild of editing-writing team Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. Hugo Award-winner Ann VanderMeer until recently edited Weird Tales Magazine and has co-edited several anthologies with her husband. Jeff’s last novel, Finch, was a finalist for the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award. Together they edited the just-released The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories (Atlantic/Corvus), a 750,000-word, 100-year retrospective of weird fiction.

The site kicks off today with the following features:

---Exclusive interview with Neil Gaiman about weird fiction:


---First episode of exclusive “Reading The Weird” webcomic by Leah Thomas:


---Translation of Thomas Owen’s short story “Kavar the Rat” by Edward Gauvin:


---The full Table of Contents for The Weird compendium, with notes:

---Weird Gallery, Featuring the art of New Orleans artist Myrtle Von Damitz III:


Come back later this week and next for: “Weirdly Epic: A Century of First Lines,” exclusive interviews with Kelly Link and Thomas Ligotti, a feature on artist/writer Alfred Kubin, Kafkaesque entertainments, China Mieville’s “AFTERWEIRD: The Efficacy of a Worm-eaten Dictionary,”  and a feature on classic Weird Tales women writers. An ongoing “101 Weird Writers” feature will also begin next week.

Weirdfictionreview.com will initially focus on features related to The Weird compendium, but its primary mission over time will be to serve as an ongo­ing explo­ration into all facets of the weird, in all of its many forms — a kind of “non-denominational” approach that appre­ci­ates Love­craft but also writers like Franz Kafka, Angela Carter, and Shirley Jack­son – along with the next gen­er­a­tion of weird writ­ers and inter­na­tional weird. Writer Angela Slatter serves as the managing editor.