Download or read book Disturbing Muses written by Mike Allen and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2005-09-01 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I have said, I think, that these poems are interpretations of what the poet sees on the canvas. I add that they are imaginary biographies, as true as anything that actually happened: they are biographies written the other way around, from the evidence of the art. Pablo Picasso's relationship with women, for instance, as when he left her a twisted, flattened shell, curled like wet canvas on his padded chair, mouth soundlessly screaming from the same side of her face that both eyes now stared from. Isn't that, don't you think it is, the way it (actually, metaphorically, what's the difference) happened- from the Introduction by Theodora Goss

Download or read book Unseaming written by Mike Allen and published by Mythic Delirium Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW WITH NEW BONUS CONTENT! 2014 Shirley Jackson Award finalist for best collection 2014 This Is Horror Award finalist for best collection 2015 Chesley Award finalist for best cover Mike Allen has put together a first class collection of horror and dark fantasy. Unseaming burns bright as hell among its peers. --Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All Allen's stories deliver solid shivering terror tinged with melancholy sorrow over the fragility of humankind. --Publishers Weekly, starred review The stories ... range from the sly to the splatteringly horrific, with every nuance of dread and menace in between. --Library Journal, starred review Everyone in the world awakens covered in blood-and no one knows where the blood came from. A childhood doll arrives to tear its owner's reality limb from limb. A portal to the spirit realm stretches wide on the Appalachian Trail, and something more than human crawls through on eight legs. Words of comfort change to terrifying sounds as a force from outside time speaks through them. The buttons in the bin will unseam your flesh to bare your nastiest secrets. Opening with "The Button Bin," a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and culminating with its sequel, "The Quiltmaker," which Bram Stoker Award and Shirley Jackson Award winner Laird Barron has hailed as Mike Allen's masterpiece, this debut collection gathers fourteen horror tales that, in the words of Barron's introduction, "rival anything committed to paper by the likes of contemporary masters such as Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, or Caitlín Kiernan. This is raw, visceral, and sometimes bloody stuff. Primal stuff." More praise for Unseaming: Throughout Unseaming, reality is usually in bad shape right from the start-and from there things proceed to go downhill. Such is the general background and trajectory of life in Mike Allen's fictional world. More could be said, of course, but there's one thing that I feel especially urged to say: these stories are fun. Not "good" fun, and certainly not "good clean" fun. They are too unnerving for those modifiers, too serious, like laughter in the dark-unnerving, serious laughter that leads you through Mr. Allen's funhouse. The reality in there is also in bad shape, deliberately so, just for the seriously unnerving fun of it. The prose is poetic, except it's nonsense poetry, the poetry of deteriorating realities, intermingling realities, realities without Reality. And all the while that unnerving, serious laughter keeps getting louder and louder. Are we having fun yet? --Thomas Ligotti, author of Teatro Grottesco and The Spectral Link Allen can write as lyrically and as viscerally as the best of them ... an exceptional debut collection. --Locus Mike Allen's Unseaming confirms his status as a poet who writes in dread and awe rather than ink. His most recurrent themes are those of wrenching loss and transformative retribution, with a liberal helping of the literal fear of God(s); sowing out a hundred different apocalypses, personal and otherwise, these stories reap an unforgettable crop of nightmares, sketching a chimeric universe in which shape-changing is less a rumour or an option than a sad, simple inevitability. Not to be missed. --Gemma Files, author of We Will All Go Down Together Mike Allen blends a poet's attention to language with a crime reporter's instinct for the darker precincts of human behavior...These stories glow with demonic energy, and what they illuminate are the faces of our secret selves, screaming back at us from the mirror's depths. --John Langan, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies Offbeat, gruesome conceits and expert delivery. --Asimov's Science Fiction One of the most original practitioners of the body horror subgenre since Clive Barker's Books of Blood. --Rue Morgue

Download or read book Medical Muses written by Asti Hustvedt and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1862 the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris became the epicenter of the study of hysteria, the mysterious illness then thought to affect half of all women. There, prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's contentious methods caused furore within the church and divided the medical community. Treatments included hypnosis, piercing and the evocation of demons and, despite the controversy they caused, the experiments became a fascinating and fashionable public spectacle. Medical Muses tells the stories of the women institutionalised in the Salpêtrière. Theirs is a tale of science and ideology, medicine and the occult, of hypnotism, sadism, love and theatre. Combining hospital records, municipal archives, memoirs and letters, Medical Muses sheds new light on a crucial moment in psychiatric history.

Download or read book Mythic 2 written by Mike Allen and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's greatest sorcerer is losing his mind, and all the nations wait in fear for his next move. The faces of the future gaze forward and back, and sirens don't always sing the songs you expect. Deserts speak with the voices of girls, mothers and stepmothers are two pages of the same book, and churches house things stranger than angels. But in the afterlife, you never know when an absinthe spoon will come in handy . . . . The second volume in the critically acclaimed fantasy anthology series from Mythic Delirium Books, edited by Rhysling Award-winning poet Mike Allen, with new writings by Leah Bobet, Richard Parks, Cherie Priest, Catherynne M. Valente, Lawrence Schimel, Sonya Taaffe, Steve Rasnic Tem, Jo Walton and more.

Download or read book Mythic Delirium written by Mike Allen and published by Mythic Delirium Books. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Rich word choices and settings that blend speculative concepts with quotidian reality highlight this stellar anthology of prose and poetry.” —Publishers Weekly “One of those rare long-term survivors of the small-press landscape…contributes mightily to the health of our genre.” —Locus Online Assembled from the second year of the digital journal Mythic Delirium and recast in an artfully arranged anthology, this latest offering from editors Mike and Anita Allen will introduce you to harrowing deserts and vengeful waters, to quantum mythology and edible religion, to slipstream explorations of love and identity. Publisher and editor Mike Allen writers in his introduction, “If you’re on a quest for the weird, lowercase, here is a book where you can find it. And likely The Weird as well.” This international anthology of beautiful prose and strange verse features Saira Ali, Michele Bannister, Alicia Cole, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Gwynne Garfinkle, Brady Golden, Adam Howe, John Philip Johnson, Jamie Killen, Swapna Kishore, Margo Lanagan, Geoffrey A. Landis, Nathaniel Lee, Rose Lemberg, Livia Llewellyn, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, C.S. MacCath, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Lynette Mejía, Virginia M. Mohlere, Sunny Moraine, Kristine Ong Muslim, Dominik Parisien, Jessy Randall, Wendy Rathbone, Sonya Taaffe, Shveta Thakrar, Natalia Theodoridou, Sheree Renée Thomas and Jane Yolen. Cover art by Hugo Award winner Galen Dara.

Download or read book Neuromatic written by John Lardas Modern and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-09-29 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The story Modern tells ranges from eighteenth-century brain anatomies to the MRI; from the spread of phrenological cabinets and mental pieties in the nineteenth century to the discovery of the motor cortex and the emergence of the brain wave as a measurable manifestation of cognition; from cybernetic research into neural networks and artificial intelligence to the founding of brain-centric religious organizations such as Scientology; from the deployments of cognitive paradigms in electric shock treatment to the work of Barbara Brown, a neurofeedback pioneer who promoted the practice of controlling one's own brainwaves in the 1970s. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the 'religion' it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. Nowhere are science and religion closer than when they try to exclude each other, at their own peril"--

Download or read book Mythic written by Mike Allen and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid the hard-scrabble West Virginia coal mines, a terrible magical vengeance takes an equally terrible toll on a young boy's heart. Ancient gods provide metaphors for a father's love and a child's grief, and Cinderella's shattered glass slippers become a window into the horror of the Holocaust. A mythic tale of a little girl's rebellion explains all the craziness of weather, and the Wandering Jew reveals the truth about the Loch Ness Monster. Longtime Mythic Delirium editor Mike Allen returns to his fiction roots with MYTHIC, a digest of fantasy prose and verse in the tradition of Prime Books' Jabberwocky. This volume, the first of a planned anthology series, places off-beat new talents like Matthew Cheney, Theodora Goss, Richard Parks and Sonya Taaffe alongside veterans such as Joe Haldeman and Ian Watson to offer a unique literary smorgasbord of humor and horror, wonder and wisdom.

Download or read book Music Speaks written by Daniel Albright and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the meaning(s) of music, the most intricate and significant language invented by our culture.

Download or read book Handbook of Exercises and Reading Lessons for Beginners in Latin written by James Morris Whiton and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Slow Burn written by Mike Allen and published by Mythic Delirium Books. This book was released on 2024-07-16 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Nerve-racking anticipation and dread ... An assemblage of horror tales and somber verses that frighten and fascinate.” —Kirkus Reviews “Will appeal to horror fans seeking something fresh.” —Publishers Weekly "Mythical, chilling, and visceral . . . Truly a slow burn readers will crave to simmer in." —Ai Jiang, Hugo Award-nominated author of Linghun and I Am AI "Slow Burn is a multifaceted, multifarious feast for the horror-hungry." —Matthew M. Bartlett, author of Gateways to Abomination and Where Night Cowers "By turns gorgeous, horrifying, gruesome, furious, darkly erotic, wickedly funny, and frequently all of those things at once, this extraordinary collection never shies away from pushing the reader's boundaries. Allen masterfully succeeds in being transgressive in all the best and most beautiful ways. I adore this book." —Sunny Moraine, author of Your Shadow Half Remains The search for a missing grandson unearths a pit of unholy hunger. A war between flesh-stealing supernatural entities will subject an entire city to devastating mayhem. In a harrowing future world, a slave is charged by his terrifying master with building a creature in its likeness. The voyage of a plague ship won't end at mere death. Parasites are partners and lovers, and the immortal soul is but a single stage in the complex life cycle of a symbiote. Slow Burn gathers fourteen stories of horror and thirteen macabre poems by two-time World Fantasy Award finalist Mike Allen, author of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated collections Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident. Allen's works are "exquisite and vivid, his worlds rich with brilliant detail," says three-time Bram Stoker Award® winner Christina Sng in her introduction. "The images he paints with words are terrifying and mesmerizing, keeping you enthralled, unable to look away." These tales and verses, set in worlds of fantasy and sorcery, in twisted, surreal futures, and in hard-boiled modern milieus . . . all find ways to explore the abyssal darkness of the human heart. Cover art and design by Lasse Paldanius; interior illustrations by Paula Arwen Owen PRAISE FOR SLOW BURN "An astonishing range of ideas and themes that never quail from their subjects. They'll remain with you long after reading, like ash residue from a long-burning fire." —Preston Grassmann, co-editor of The Mad Butterfly's Ball "Don't let the title fool you, Slow Burn is an artistic flame that blazes like an inferno from start to finish!" —Vaughn A. Jackson, author of Touched by Shadows "Diabolically inventive and varied . . . You'll laugh, shudder, cry, and throw up a little in your mouth. Mike Allen's range can outstretch any fleshy hell-tendril, darting from experimental poetry to cheeky Clive Barker satire to whip-sharp supernatural thrillers . . . achingly human characters and heaping, writhing helpings of body horror." —Rich Larson, author of Ymir and Tomorrow Factory "Unsettling, perceptive, always surprising, always absorbing—Slow Burn is a collection of gems." —Premee Mohamed, Nebula Award-winning author of Beneath the Rising "Consuming horror that is not for the squeamish!" —Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories "At turns dripping with Cronenberg body horror, infused with Barker misanthropy, and crawling with the darkest fantasy, the stories and poems in Slow Burn are beautifully crafted to lure you in, but their beauty won't let you go easily. There are too many strange limbs for that." —Michael Wehunt, author of The Inconsolables "Like one of the extra-dimensional creatures lurking within Slow Burn's collected stories and novella, author Mike Allen must also have a thousand eyes, a hundred mouths, and far too many fingers. How else could he find so many strange and hidden worlds—not to mention the strangeness hidden in our own world—and translate it all so beautifully? A mind-bending delight from a horrifically unique imagination, Slow Burn will twist, turn, and transform readers." —Gordon B. White, finalist for the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Awards PRAISE FOR MIKE ALLEN "These stories are fun. Not 'good' fun, and certainly not 'good clean' fun. They are too unnerving for those modifiers, too serious, like laughter in the dark—unnerving, serious laughter that leads you through Mr. Allen's funhouse." —Thomas Ligotti "Mike Allen habitually upends Lovecraftian tropes with his own brand of cosmic horror." —Laird Barron "Mike Allen is a master of horror and dark fantasy." —Cemetery Dance

Download or read book Smith Or The Tears of the Muses written by Gabriel Harvey and published by Anaphora Literary Press. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poetic satire of ghostwriters being hired to write puffery of and by patrons and sponsors, who pay to gain immortal fame for being “great”, while failing to perform any work to deserve any praise. This volume shows the similarities across Gabriel Harvey’s poetic canon stretching from his critically-ignored self-attributed Smith (1578), his famous “Edmund Spenser”-bylined Fairy Queen (1590), and his semi-recognized “Samuel Brandon”-bylined Virtuous Octavia (1598). This close analysis of Smith is essential for explaining all of Harvey’s multi-bylined output because Smith is an extensive confession about Harvey’s ghostwriting process. Harvey’s Fairy Queen is his mature attempt at an extensive puffery of a monarch, which has been (as Harvey predicted in Smith and Ciceronianus) in return over-puffed as a “great” literary achievement by monarchy-conserving literary scholars across the past four hundred years. The relatively superior in its condensed social message and literary achievement Smith has been ignored in part because the subject of its puffery appears trivial from the perspective of national propaganda. Smith: Or, The Tears of the Muses is a metered poetic composition that can also be performed as a multi-monologue play. The central formulaic structure is grounded in nine Cantos that are delivered by each of the nine Muses; this formula appeared in many British poems and interludes after its appearance in “Nicholas Grimald’s” translation of a “Virgil”-assigned poem called “The Muses” in Songs and Sonnets (1557). The repetitive nature of this puffing formula is subverted not only by the satirical and ironic contradictions that are mixed with the standard exaggerated flatteries of “Sir Thomas Smith” (Elizabeth’s Secretary), but also with several seemingly digressive sections that puff and satirize other bylines, including “Walter Mildmay” (King’s Councilor) and “John Wood” (“Smith’s” copyist and nephew). The central subject of the satire in Smith is Richard Verstegan’s career as a goldsmith, who forged antiques, and committed identity fraud that included ghostwriting books under multiple bylines, including passing himself (as Harvey points out) as at least two different “Sir Thomas Smiths”. The introduction to this volume includes matching handwritten letters that were written by Smith #1 (who died in 1577) and Smith #2 (who died in 1625) and by Verstegan under his own byline. In Smith’s conclusion, Verstegan responds with ridicule of his own directed at Harvey. This is the first full translation of Smith from Latin into English. The accompanying introductory matter, extensive annotations, and class exercises hint at the many scholarly discoveries attainable by researchers who continue the exploration of this elegant work. Acronyms and Figures Exordium Biographies of Sir Smith and Connected Persons The Many “Smiths” and Their Matching Handwriting Synopsis English Translation of Smith/ Latin Original Smithus Text Terms, References, Questions, Exercises

Download or read book A History of Six Ideas written by W. Tatarkiewicz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of aesthetics, like the histories of other sciences, may be treated in a two-fold manner: as the history of the men who created the field of study, or as the history of the questions that have been raised and resolved in the course of its pursuit. The earlier History of Aesthetics (3 volumes, 1960-68, English-language edition 1970-74) by the author of the present book was a history of men, of writers and artists who in centuries past have spoken up concerning beauty and art, form and crea tivity. The present book returns to the same subject, but treats it in a different way: as the history of aesthetic questions, concepts, theories. The matter of the two books, the previous and the present, is in part the same; but only in part: for the earlier book ended with the 17th century, while the present one brings the subject up to our own times. And from the 18th century to the 20th much happened in aesthetics; it was only in that period that aesthetics achieved recognition as a separate science, received a name of its own, and produced theories that early scholars and artists had never dreamed of.

Download or read book Strange Wisdoms of the Dead written by Mike Allen and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of poetry and prose inspired by fantasy and mysticism.

Download or read book Cyborgs Sexuality and the Undead written by M. Elizabeth Ginway and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writers in Brazil and Mexico discovered early on that speculative fiction provides an ideal platform for addressing the complex issues of modernity, yet the study of speculative fictions rarely strays from the United States and England. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead expands the traditional purview of speculative fiction in all its incarnations (science fiction, fantasy, horror) beyond the traditional Anglo-American context to focus on work produced in Mexico and Brazil across a historical overview from 1870 to the present. The book portrays the effects—and ravages—of modernity in these two nations, addressing its technological, cultural, and social consequences and their implications for the human body. In Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead, M. Elizabeth Ginway examines all these issues from a number of theoretical perspectives, most importantly through the lens of Bolívar Echeverría’s “baroque ethos,” which emphasizes the strategies that subaltern populations may adopt in order to survive and prosper in the face of massive historical and structural disadvantages. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics is developed in discussion with Roberto Esposito’s concept of immunity and Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between “political life” and “bare life.” This book will be of interest to scholars of speculative fiction, as well as Mexicanists and Brazilianists in history, literary studies, and critical theory.

Download or read book Arts Ideas written by William Fleming and published by Holt McDougal. This book was released on 1980 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended for courses in Western Humanities, this best-selling text chronologically explores the major styles as they appear in painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music, and philosophy from antiquity to present. Using lively anecdotes, Fleming shows how the styles are linked together by common purposes, themes, and ideas.

Download or read book Hungry Constellations written by Mike Allen and published by Mythic Delirium Books. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The poems in Mike Allen’s latest book, Hungry Constellations, make a rowdy, red-tinged tapestry, representing twenty years of work from one of the major creative forces in this genre. These poems are physical, expansive, and revolutionary. They are grand and dystopic. They seethe with the conflict of opposites. Allen likes the destructive side of creation as much as the emergent side ... He writes about stars and legends and human beings contending with the monster-filled and glorious cosmos. He does it all with a relentless, energetic style, full of thought and invention.” —Star*Line The mutants of Wonderland threaten to smash through the looking glass as the river of Time overflows its banks. The King of Cats and the Queen of Wolves dance a duet across eons, alternately foes and lovers. Monstrous constellations come to life in the sky, hungry for people-filled worlds. Hungry Constellations, the newest poetry collection from Nebula Award finalist and three-time Rhysling Award winner Mike Allen, surveys two decades of mind-bending verse. Editor Dominik Parisien starts with poems drawn from Allen’s previous book-length collections, Strange Wisdoms of the Dead (2006) and The Journey to Kailash (2008), then concludes the triptych with a selection of new and previously uncollected pieces, which author, poet and editor Amal El-Mohtar calls Allen’s most ambitious work to date in her introduction. Cover artist Paula Arwen Friedlander (arwendesigns.net) adroitly illustrates the collection’s Rhysling Award-nominated title poem. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, Hungry Constellations is Allen’s first poetry collection available in digital format. From the introduction by Amal El-Mohtar: “Let me tell you about Mike Allen’s poetry. This is a man who delights in breaking bodies: butchering, splitting, flaying, dismembering, then seeding landscapes with viscera until they too become bodies—bodies invaded, bodies stuffed, bodies contaminated. This is a man who carves words into and out of bodies, be they skin or sapphire, corpses or constellations. But somehow Allen skirts gore and clinical detachment both: there is a precision and an economy to his horror that’s reminiscent of clockwork, architecture, astronomy. Imagine a clock with bone-gears, a skin-tree growing liver-fruit, a ship knifing a face into the moon, and you’ll have something of a sense of what lies before you … Subterranean in conception and galactic in execution, this is a book of monsters.” Praise for Mike Allen's poetry: “Allen’s is poetry for goths of all ages … There is a long tradition of poetry dealing with the uncanny—think Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ or Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’—and it’s nice to see someone putting it to such use again. Allen’s poems … do a fine job of making the human scary and the scary human.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Mike Allen pours everything he’s got onto his poem-canvases. Mythologies, science-fiction scenarios, private memories and desires, and untestable ideas crowd and overlay one another upon the pages as if flung from an overloaded brush. Here is a vividly vertiginous collection of poems, all fun and mind-games.” —Fred Chappell “Mike Allen is a poetic Shiva, whirling his thousand limbs to snatch gold from thin air and create these epics-in-miniature, each with its own metallic sheen.” —Catherynne M. Valente “In the great tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin, Mike Allen shows us how science fiction poetry can do what all first-rate poetry does—rouse the imagination to venture into darkness and the unknown, there to discover old truths and new delights.” —R.H.W. Dillard

Download or read book The Surrealist Parade written by Wayne Andrews and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1990 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of the surrealist movement, includes brief profiles of leading surrealist artists and writers, and discusses the aims of the movement.