Month: December 2024

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‘The Bewitched Bourgeois’ by Dino Buzzati

Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic—reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century. Read more

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Barry N. Malzberg Dies at 85

The key fact about Malzberg was not just that he was fast—but that he was good. Perfectly readable was his baseline minimum, and when he was at his peak, he overshot that to achieve genuine brilliance. It’s easy enough to tote up evidence of Malzberg’s prolificity: In his peak decade, from 1967 to 1976, Malzberg wrote at least 68 novels and seven story collections along with scores of still uncollected stories published in many magazines and anthologies. He worked in a variety of genres, including mystery, thrillers, erotica, and adventure fiction, but his core work was in science fiction. Malzberg’s best science fiction novels—titles such as Beyond Apollo (1972), Herovit’s World (1973), Guernica Night (1975), and Galaxies (1975)—were astonishingly incisive critiques of modern technology and mass society. Intimately familiar with the genre, Malzberg used all the familiar SF tropes (space exploration, time travel, alternative histories) but amped them up with a bracing dose of pessimism and the stylistic bravura of literary modernism. Read more

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The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers

Charles Fort (1874–1932), the progenitor of modern supernatural studies, rattled the “iron cage of rationality” in the early 20th century, according to this enthralling account. Buhs (Bigfoot) argues that Fort’s unique brand of science-mysticism—he was best known for collecting and compiling newspaper clippings of inexplicable events and for promoting paranormal research—influenced several divergent but interlocking branches of art, politics, and culture. During Fort’s lifetime, his writings on metaphysics inspired avant-gardists and modernists—including Henry Miller and Ezra Pound—who adopted many of his habits of thought, according to Buhs, especially his skepticism of science, penchant for mythmaking, and search for hidden truths. After his death, his legacy fell to two acolytes who founded the Fortean Society: adman Tiffany Thayer and science fiction writer Eric Frank Russell. Buhs traces how, as Fort’s thinking grew ever more influential in the 1950s, inspiring both the golden age of sci-fi and UFO-mania, Thayer and Russell led Fortean thought in a less playful, more paranoid direction; they came to believe that the government was covering up the existence of the supernatural, helping to give birth to America’s robust conspiracy theory subculture. Buhs’s erudite narrative is jam-packed with minor and major 20th-century figures who he shows were influenced by Fort. The result is a lively alternative history of modernity. Read more

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The ‘Voltaire of the Arabs’ Is Beloved in France, but Imprisoned in Algeria

A renowned Franco-Algerian writer’s detention in Algeria has cast in stark relief the challenges that France faces in protecting writers who criticize Islam and authoritarian governments. The Nov. 16 arrest of Boualem Sansal, who some call “the Voltaire of the Arab people,” points to the limits of France’s leverage with its former colony, as French officials seek Mr. Sansal’s release. France has long held up its literary tradition as a space where freedom of expression can thrive. But Mr. Sansal’s arrest has shown that its protections can only go so far, especially for Franco-Algerian writers who carry the weight of the two countries’ complex, 132-year-long colonial past. Read more

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New Exhibition Features Imaginary Books

The poems of Sappho, Dylan Thomas’s abandoned manuscript Llareggub, the nested books from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler – all are lost to time or limited to fiction. That they are seen in our world at all is thanks to Reid Byers, the creator and curator of the Imaginary Books collection, who imagined what these books might look like, should we be able to perceive them. Read more

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