Arts and Culture

Orwell among roses

George Orwell was the great writer on tyranny and authoritarianism. But as Rebecca Solnit shows in her book "Orwell’s Roses," he was also a gardener who loved flowers and trees. Beauty and the natural world sustained him through difficult times.More

A wolf eyes the horizon

Horror writer Stephen Graham Jones loves werewolves. He redefined the genre with his 2016 novel "Mongrels," about a family of werewolves on the run in a hostile American landscape — a story drawn from his own background.More

pie

Lulu Miller, author of “Why Fish Don’t Exist,” first read the young adult book “The Search for Delicious” when she was in that transformative and uncertain stage in between childhood and adulthood.More

the raven

Bad things happen when people lose their connection to the more-than-human world. "Animals know something that we that don't," says psychologist Sharon Blackie. That's one lesson you can take from the old shapeshifting myths and fairy tales.More

an unspeakable terror humming in the distance

Dean Lockwood talks about the important role that sound plays in creating the cosmic horror of Lovecraft's work.More

what lives in a black hole

H.P. Lovecraft's influence on pop culture has exploded in recent years. But why? Erik Davis is a cultural critic and the author of the essay, "Calling Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft's Magickal Realism." He fell under Lovecraft's spell as a teenager.More

Although Jeff VanderMeer's work may seem to have a Lovecraftian influence, VanderMeer says that's not the case. He actually thinks weird fiction needs to move out from the shadow of Lovecraft's incredible influence. He introduces us to one writer who is doing that -- Thomas Ligotti, "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction."More

lovecraftian

Think that it's too soon to get your kids hooked on H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror? Think again. They might be enchanted by "The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers" by Richard Ivankovic, alias Doctor Faustus AS.More

The Labyrinth

In “Somnium DreamViewer,” a mysterious company has developed the technology to capture still images from our dreams — with unsettling effects on our waking hours. Creator Holly Fernwright explains the inspiration behind the series. More

Yuria Celidwen

Yuria Celidwen has a wide-ranging critique of how the modern psychedelic movement is taking shape. She was the lead author of a recent article in Lancet arguing for new ethical guidelines for using psychedelics — what she calls “spirit medicine.”More

An African imagination of the future.

Given the chance, how do Africans tell stories about their own imagined future? And how might the story be different? To get a sense of where African science fiction is heading, we talked with Nnedi Okorafor and Ainehi Edoro.More

"You're not ok, that's ok" yard sign

During the height of the pandemic, producer Charles Monroe-Kane made a yard sign — 300 of them, in fact. They read "You're not ok. That's ok." He put a few in his yard and the rest on his porch. Soon they were gone.More

water

David Foster Wallace gave the commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. It was popular enough to eventually be published in a thin little book called “This Is Water.”More

David Foster Wallace

Over the years, we did several interviews with Wallace himself. The last was in 2004, about his collection of short stories — "Oblivion." It’s an interview that’s been collected in two Wallace anthologies.More

Cruises suck

David Foster Wallace's essays have their own unique cult following. There’s one, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which is a hilarious diatribe about cruise ships, which convinced many of us we should never, ever go on a cruise.More

water

An excerpt from the commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005.More

During his lifetime, David Foster Wallace was one of the leading figures of post-modern literature. Speaking to TTBOOK in 1996, he said that he saw himself as a realist.More

Roadtrip

Amy Wallace-Havens didn’t care whether David was famous, or even whether he was a writer. He was just her big brother. Anne spoke with her about a year after his death.
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