Download or read book The Wrong Turning Encounters with Ghosts written by Stephen Johnson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduced and edited by broadcaster Stephen Johnson, a curated selection of chilling ghost stories from world literature. Why do people love ghost stories, even if they don’t believe (or say they don’t believe) in ghosts? Is it simply the adrenaline rush that comes from being mesmerized and terrified by a great storyteller, or do these tales yield deeper meanings—telling us things about our own inner shadows? Stephen Johnson brings together some of the most memorable encounters with ghosts in world literature, from Europe, Russia, the United States, and China. Recurring themes and imagery are noted, interpretations suggested—but only suggested, since ambiguity and resistance to rational interpretation are key elements in the best ghost stories. As the writer Robert Aickman observed, often the decisive moment comes when someone, somehow, makes a “wrong turning”—literally, perhaps, but at the same time psychologically, even morally—and some mysterious nemesis takes over. Old favorites by M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are interlaced with extracts from longer works by Emily Brontë, Henry James, and Alexander Pushkin,, along with slightly left-field apparitions from Tove Jansson and Flann O’Brien. With such expert guides, who knows what we will be led to encounter in the haunted chambers of our minds?
Download or read book Turning Home written by Paul F. Eno and published by New River Press (RI). This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who are you? Where will you go when you die? Where are your loved ones who already have? Who is God? Why are we the way we are? Why is God the way God is? Is there a God? In this astounding, information-packed book, an award-winning journalist, seminary graduate and 35-year paranormal investigator offers answers that could transform your life, and maybe the whole world.
Download or read book The Amityville Horror written by Jay Anson and published by Gallery Books. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A fascinating and frightening book” (Los Angeles Times)—the bestselling true story about a house possessed by evil spirits, haunted by psychic phenomena almost too terrible to describe. In December 1975, the Lutz family moved into their new home on suburban Long Island. George and Kathleen Lutz knew that, one year earlier, Ronald DeFeo had murdered his parents, brothers, and sisters in the house, but the property—complete with boathouse and swimming pool—and the price had been too good to pass up. Twenty-eight days later, the entire Lutz family fled in terror. This is the spellbinding, shocking true story that gripped the nation about an American dream that turned into a nightmare beyond imagining—“this book will scare the hell out of you” (Kansas City Star).
Download or read book Cary Grant s Suit written by Todd McEwen and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cinematic memoir and critical exploration of nine classics of old Hollywood by a contemporary comic novelist. “North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The suit, Cary inside it, strides with confidence into the Plaza Hotel. Nothing bad happens to it until one of the greasy henchmen grasps Cary by the shoulder. We’re already in love with this suit and it feels like a real violation.” Todd McEwen grew up in Southern California, so his head was hopelessly messed with by the movies. As the son of relatively normal people, Todd had no in with Hollywood, a mere thirteen miles away, yearn and try as he might. This is a kid who loved the movies so much, he got up at 4:30 in the morning to watch Laurel and Hardy. A kid who insisted on his birthday that his father project 8mm cartoons onto the family’s dining room curtains so they could be slowly parted, just like at a real cinema. This is a kid who liked to leave the movie and trudge up hundreds of dangerous iron steps to visit the lugubrious and always surprised projectionist. This is a kid who, years later, watched Chinatown over 60 times. A love letter to old Hollywood, this is a book for anyone interested in film. Movies discussed include Blotto, The Wizard of Oz, The Three Stooges, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps, The Trouble with Harry, and many, many more.
Download or read book In the Realm of Ghosts and Hauntings written by E. Randall Floyd and published by Harbor House. This book was released on 2002 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goes behind headlines and datelines to explore disturbing truth behind 40 famous and not-so-famous supernatural occurrence from around the world. truth behind 40 famous and not-so-famous supermatural occurrence from the around the world.
Download or read book Tales from the Haunted South written by Tiya Miles and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-08-12 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.
Download or read book Midlife Humanity s Secret Weapon written by Andrew Jamieson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical new take on one of humanity's most misunderstood periods of transition: the midlife crisis. Only two species of mammal have a post-reproductive life that lasts longer than their reproductive life: killer whales, whose elders are able to sniff out food supplies over vast oceanic distances to keep their pods fed, and Homo sapiens. While the evolutionary purpose of the killer whale’s extensive life seems clear, what is the point of ours? This was a question that intrigued the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who observed that if a culture is to maintain its deepest, profoundest roots while moving forward to embrace the challenges of historical and technological change, it needs to find an equilibrium between the energy, vigor, and creativity of those in the ego-driven first half of life and the experience, dignity, and wisdom of those in the second. But to make it to that second half of life, we need to traverse the dreaded middle years, when so many of us find ourselves discontented with our jobs, unhappy in our relationships, and lamenting our fetishized youths. In this highly readable and groundbreaking new book, the psychoanalyst Andrew Jamieson examines the Jungian concept of the midlife crisis to show how it is an essential evolutionary and social rite of passage that we all must proceed through—a set of challenges that we either take advantage of or ignore, depending on whether our complex or neurosis blocks this developmental impulse. Drawing on history, psychology, science, and literature, Jamieson shows just how ubiquitous, and crucial, the “midlife crisis” is, and the devastating consequences for society at large if we continue to regard it as something we can, and should, avoid.
Download or read book Ghost Stories and Mysteries written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1975-01-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remaining supernatural fiction by writer many consider greatest ghost story writer of all time. Mystery stories are equally memorable.
Download or read book Ghosts of Wyoming written by Alyson Hagy and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unsentimental vision of the west, new and old, comes to life in a gritty new collection of stories by the author of Snow, Ashes In Ghosts of Wyoming, Alyson Hagy explores the hardscrabble lives and terrain of America's least-populous state. Beyond the tourist destinations of Jackson Hole and Yellowstone lies a less familiar and wilder frontier defined by the tension wrought by abundance and scarcity. A young runaway with a big secret slips across the state border and steals a collie pup from the Meeker County fairgrounds. A chorus of trainmen details a day spent laying rail across the Wyoming Territory, while contemporary voices describe life in the oil and gas fields near Gillette. A traveling preacher is caught up in a deadly skirmish between cattle rustlers and ranchers on his way from Rawlins to the Indian reservation on the Popo Agie River. Locals and activists clash when a tourist makes an archaeological discovery near Hoodoo Mountain. With spirited, lyrical prose, Hagy expertly weaves together Wyoming's colorful pioneer and speculator history with the notoften- heard voices of petroleum workers, thrill-seeking rock climbers, and those left behind by the latest boom and bust.
Download or read book Ghosts by Gaslight written by Jack Dann and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventeen all-new stories illuminate the steampunk world of fog and fear! Modern masters of the supernatural weave their magic to revitalize the chilling Victorian and Edwardian ghostly tale: here are haunted houses, arcane inventions, spirits reaching across the centuries, ghosts in the machine, fateful revelations, gaslit streets scarcely keeping the dark at bay, and other twisted variations on the immortal classics that frighten us still.
Download or read book Maynard s House written by Herman Raucher and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2015-05-03 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Told with icy precision of eye and ear and a wink of wicked humor . . . First-rate haunted-house creepiness” from the bestselling author of Summer of ’42 (Kirkus Reviews). Austin Fletcher, a disturbed young Vietnam War vet, is willed a small house deep in the woods of northern Maine. He comes to own it by the generosity of a brother-in-arms—a fellow soldier and confidante, Maynard Whittier, killed in action by a wayward mortar shell. The rugged landscape of Maine is an intoxicating blend of claustrophobic interiors and endless frozen wastelands. Little by little, the mysterious force in the house asserts itself until Austin isn’t exactly sure what is in his mind and what is real. And just when our hero’s had enough and is ready to quit the place, a blizzard arrives and the real haunting begins. “An unsettling experience . . . Confounding, touching and well-written.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Haunting Experiences written by Diane Goldstein and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2007-09-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.
Download or read book Weird N J written by Mark Moran and published by Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.. This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores haunted places, local legends, crazy characters, and unusual roadside attractions found in New Jersey.
Download or read book The Turn of the Screw written by Henry James and published by Aegitas. This book was released on 2024-08-22 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is a classic ghost story that continues to captivate readers over a century after its initial publication. Set in the late 19th century, the novella follows a young governess who is hired to care for two young children, Flora and Miles, at the remote and eerie Bly Manor. As the governess begins her duties, she becomes increasingly convinced that the manor is haunted by the spirits of the previous governess, Miss Jessel, and her lover, Peter Quint, who both died under mysterious circumstances. The story unfolds as the governess tries to protect the children from the malevolent ghosts, while also questioning her own sanity and the motives of the children in their interactions with the spirits. One of the most intriguing aspects of The Turn of the Screw is its unreliable narrator. The story is told through the perspective of the governess, whose mental state and perceptions of events are constantly called into question. This creates a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty, leaving readers to question whether the ghosts are real or just figments of the governess's imagination. James masterfully plays with the theme of perception and reality, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions about the events at Bly Manor. Another striking element of the novella is its use of Gothic elements. The isolated location, the decaying mansion, and the presence of ghosts all contribute to the eerie atmosphere of the story. James also incorporates psychological horror, as the governess's fears and paranoia intensify throughout the story, building tension and suspense. The Turn of the Screw is a prime example of Gothic literature, with its exploration of the dark side of human nature and the blurred lines between the living and the dead. One of the most controversial aspects of the novella is its ambiguous ending. The governess's final confrontation with the ghosts and the fate of the children are left open to interpretation, inviting readers to ponder the true meaning of the story. Some critics argue that the ghosts are a product of the governess's overactive imagination, while others believe that they are real and that the children are in danger. This open-ended conclusion has sparked countless debates and interpretations, making The Turn of the Screw a thought-provoking and enduring piece of literature. In addition to its literary merits, The Turn of the Screw also offers insight into the societal norms and expectations of the time period in which it was written. James explores themes of gender roles and class distinctions through the character of the governess, who is expected to be subservient and obedient to her male employer and to maintain the social hierarchy between herself and the children. The story also touches on the taboo subject of sexual relationships, particularly in regards to the ghosts and their influence on the children. Ultimately, The Turn of the Screw is a haunting and enigmatic work that continues to captivate readers with its complex characters, Gothic atmosphere, and thought-provoking themes. It is a testament to Henry James's mastery of storytelling and his ability to create a sense of unease and suspense that lingers long after the final page. A must-read for anyone interested in Gothic literature, psychological thrillers, or the blurred lines between reality and the supernatural.
Download or read book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind written by Stephen Johnson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson's struggle with bipolar disorder. BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experience, where he believes Shostakovich’s music helped him survive the trials and assaults of bipolar disorder. There is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich’s greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to Shostakovich for having created it—not just Russians, but westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a very different, far safer kind of society? The book includes interviews with the members of the orchestra who performed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony during the siege of that city.
Download or read book Ghosts and Grisly Things written by Ramsey Campbell and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award and an eight-time winner of the British Fantasy Award, Campbell may be the genres most decorated writer. Publishers Weekly hails him as a master of the horror genre, adding, He does more than jar the nerves and chill the spine; he assails ones very grip on reality. Ghosts and Grisly Things is a chilling collection of the best of Campbells recent short fiction, most of it never before available in any form. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton written by Edith Wharton and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This haunting anthology is an enthralling collection of chilling tales infused with Edith Wharton's masterful exploration of human psychology and the hidden recesses of the human heart. As a keen observer of human nature, Wharton weaves her ghostly tales with remarkable subtlety and psychological depth. Her ghosts are not mere apparitions but poignant manifestations of guilt, regret, and unrequited desires. Through her elegant prose and sharp wit, Wharton delves into the darkest corners of the human psyche, exploring themes of forbidden passions, societal constraints, and the persistent power of the past. Each setting serves as the backdrop for chilling encounters with the spectral realm. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton is a testament to Wharton's versatility as a writer. The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, she imbues her tales with atmospheric tension, challenging the reader to question what lies beyond our mortal existence.
