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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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Films, Books and Artwork Entering the Public Domain in 2025

Examples of important literary works entering the public domain include Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, William Seabrook’s novel The Magic Island (the first book to introduce the concept of a zombie). Ellery Queen’s detective novel The Roman Hat Mystery, Margery Allingham detective novel The Crime at Black Dudley, the first English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz in its original German, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel Pather Panchali in its original Bengali, Lynd Ward’s wordless novel Gods’ Man, William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel Tarzan and the Lost Empire, Ruth Plumly Thompson’s novel Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, Bertrand Russell’s book Marriage and Morals, Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope, A. A. Milne’s play Toad of Toad Hall, Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s essay Some Remarks on Logical Form and the first part of the 14th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (full in public domain by 2029). Read more

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The Best Book Covers of 2024

If most book cover designs are conceived as quick-to-metabolize marketing tools, a great one can make the reader do a double take in slow motion. A good first impression is, of course, the goal: to elicit curiosity and excitement before you’ve even picked the book off a shelf. But a great cover can fortify itself in our consciousness, resonating more deeply as we absorb the text within, ideally prompting a second impression after we finish reading. Read more

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‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Premiers on Netflix

Welcome to Macondo, the mythical town that began with twenty houses on the bank of a river, where magical realism came to life and the Buendía family began their story. A story about the adversities of impossible loves, confrontations with a past that follows their footsteps and a curse that condemns them. Based on the masterpiece of Gabriel García Márquez comes One Hundred Years of Solitude, the series. Watch trailer

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The Artist Who Remembered Everything

This book review is a Trojan horse. Ostensibly it concerns a collection of letters titled “Love, Joe,” written by the downtown artist and writer Joe Brainard (1941-94) to friends including the poets John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and James Schuyler. Before we get to those letters, a historical wrong must be righted. Next year is the 55th anniversary of the publication of Brainard’s experimental memoir, “I Remember.” I hadn’t read it until I picked it up in preparation to write this piece. Now I consider it one of the best books I know. Read more

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