Desperate to escape living with her miserly uncle, Marjorie Easton eagerly accepts a job offer from the strange Michael Crispin despite knowing nothing of the employment except that it is well-paid and includes some kind of research. Much to her surprise, the "research" involves sEances and requires Marjorie to develop her own psychic gifts to assist in communing with the dead. Soon she begins to suffer from terrible nightmares and seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but the real terror begins when Crispin dies under mysterious circumstances during one of the sEances. Who is responsible? And what is the significance of the "six queer things" the police discover among his belongings after his death? A Golden Age mystery with echoes of the occult, The Six Queer Things (1937) was Christopher St. John Sprigg's seventh and final novel, published after his death in the Spanish Civil War. This first-ever reprint of his scarcest novel features a reproduction of the original jacket art. "A rip-roaring tale of mediums, psychic research and the powers of darkness." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "[A] hair-raising excursion into the occult, with trimmings of insanity, racketeering in souls, palpitating action, and efficient British-type sleuthing." - Saturday Review "Mystery and horror, laid on with a trowel." - New York Times

DEATH IN THE FAMILY BUT COME BACK SOON, the sign said. Obviously it was a lie. The people in the grocery store just wanted to make sure he couldn't buy the spice he needed to make the recipe he'd selected for that night (recipes must be followed exactly). Obviously they wanted him to eat out ... to meet the waitress, Marta, ... to see her horrible, unspeakable, unbearable ugliness. It was obvious to him: her maimed, twisted face was the living desire to be dead. He had to help Marta be dead. His teeth are perfectly white. He can't see colors. He keeps a combination lock on his door and has twelve shelves of cookbooks. His walls bleed blood. His suits each have a number, S-1 through S-6. And life goes on. Life goes on, if you can stand it. Life goes on, for the brave and the damned. Life goes on, but come back soon ... "An ambitious novel of psychological horror." - "Publishers Weekly" "Compelling-a tour-de-force of storytelling and style ... considerable artistry, marvelous pacing, and a welcome dose of macabre humor." - "Fantasy Review" "One of the best writers of horror in this country." - "Peter Straub"

The Essential Voices series intends to bridge English-language readers to cultures misunderstood and under- or misrepresented. It has at its heart the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. The anthology features 130 poets and translators from ten countries, including Garous Abdolmalekian, Kaveh Akbar, Kazim Ali, Reza Baraheni, Kaveh Bassiri, Simin Behbahani, Mark S. Burrows, Athena Farrokhzad, Forugh Farrokhzad, Persis Karim, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Sara Khalili, Mimi Khalvati, Esmail Khoi, Abbas Kiarostami, Fayre Makeig, Anis Mojgani, Yadollah Royai, Amir Safi, SAID, H.E. Sayeh, Roger Sedarat, Sohrab Sepehri, Ahmad Shamlu, Solmaz Sharif, Niloufar Talebi, Jean Valentine, Stephen Watts, Sholeh Wolpé, Nima Yushij, and many others. Praise Between arm-flexing states, the U.S. and Iran, the past burns and the future is held hostage. In a twilight present tense, the poets emerge, sure-footed and graceful, imagining another way, another vision of being. The range of these Iranian poets is prodigious and dizzying. Sometimes they "consider the saga of a bee / humming over minefields / in pursuit of a flower," sometimes they "bring your lips near / and pour your voice / into my mouth." Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora is a place where heartbreak and hope gather. At the shores of language, drink this bracing, slaking music. —Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora takes the extraordinary position that poetic arts from the homeland and diaspora should be read alongside each other. This vital book invites English-language readers to step into a lineage and tradition where poems—from playful to elegiac, prosaic to ornate—are fundamental to everyday living. It is the kind of book that requires two copies: one to give to a beloved, and one to keep for oneself. —Neda Maghbouleh, author of The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora offers a profoundly satisfying journey into the poetic canon of my homeland—an anthology with an ambition, expanse, depth, and diversity that truly earns its essential tag. So many poets I was hoping would be in here are here, from contemporary icons to new luminaries, plus I got to explore several poets I had never before read. Everyone from students of poetry to masters of the form should take this ride through the soul and psyche of Iran, which endures no matter where the border, beyond whatever the boundary! —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity Iranians rely on poetry to give comfort, elevate the ordinary, and illuminate the darkness. Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora layers the work of the masters with fresh voices, using sensual imagery to piece together a society fractured by revolution, war, and exile. Let the poets lead you into an Iran beyond the news reports—a place where tenderness and humor and bitterness and melancholia balance together like birds on a wire, intricately connected and poised to take flight.  —Tara Bahrampour, author of To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America

Originally published in 1927 in a small-circulation amateur magazine, spanning the period from antiquity until the 1930s, and covering both the Anglo-American world and Continental Europe, Lovecraft’s essay remains unparallelled as a survey of horror literature in our hemisphere. Said literature’s emergence as a genre coincided with the institutional establishment of liberalism, which represents a diametrically opposed worldview. This would suggest that horror literature, even if inadvertently or subconsciously, represents an attempt at escaping the limitations of the secular, materialist, rationalist Weltanschauung of liberal modernity, as well as a desire for meaning in a world rendered meaningless through ‘liberation’ from hierarchies, folk traditions, the occult, and the supernatural. Also of interest is the fact that the aesthetics of Gothic horror are invariably and luxuriantly beautiful (if in a dark way), whereas the logical extreme of rationality (utilitarianism, standardisation) is inherently anti-aesthetic. Would this not indicate, then, that the Age of Reason marked the beginning of a process that concluded in late modernity with the wholesale destruction of beauty, except where it, or the counterfeiting of it, was dictated by economic necessity? If so, we may view Lovecraft’s essay not merely as a resource for those seeking entertainment within a genre of literature, but also a map for those seeking to escape, and begin to transcend, the despair engendered by a worldview that pronounced itself dead when someone spoke of ‘the end of history’.

This book may not be, Chesterton says, important as a contribution to history, but it is important as a contribution to biography; as a contribution to the character and the career of the man who wrote it, a typical man of his time. That Dickens made no personal historical researches, that he had no special historical learning, that he had not had, in truth, even anything that could be called a good education, all this accentuates not the merit but at least the importance of the book. For here, thinks Mr. Chesterton, may be read in plain popular language, written by a man whose genius for popular exposition has never been surpassed among men, a brief account of the origin and meaning of England as it seemed to the average Englishman of that age. This book will always remain as a bright and brisk summary of the cock-sure, healthy-minded, essentially manly and essentially ungentlemanly view of history which characterises the Radicals of that particular Radical era.

Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood examines the manifestations of blood and vampires in various texts and contexts. It seeks to connect, through blood, fictional to real-life vampires to trace similarities, differences and discontinuities. These movements will be seen to parallel changing notions about embodiment and identity in culture.