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A Fine Forgotten First Novel

Exhuming The Body by William Sansom

Considering William Sansom's short fiction was once widely anthologized in frighteningly titled story collections (e.g., London Tales of Terror , Ghosts in Country Houses , The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories , as well as several installments of The Pan Book of Horror Stories ), with a novel named The Body , readers already acquainted with his better known, more diminutive, phantasmal forebears, could understandably conclude that Sansom's first novel The Body was likewise macabre.  Honest mistake, that. And perhaps also disappointing for those mystic connoisseurs of the obscure with a taste for Sansom's peculiar style of understated extravagance -- a style similar to yet not quite as distilled as that of those refined denizens of the fin de siècle , nor as baroque as the later Lovecraft crowds he was often lumped in with (peruse any of the table of contents of one of the dozens of anthologies Sansom contributed to in order to better see my point) -- wh

On visiting a brilliant bookshop yesterday, The Magic Door IV

Guest Post: LARRY RILEY's review of The Mad Patagonian by Javier Pedro Zabala

Stella Artois is a Brilliant Beer, but The Mad Patagonian is a Better Book

Non-breezy Summer Reading: Overlooked Books from the 20th Century, Year by Year (a working evolving list in progress)

Currently reading The Mad Patagonian by Javier Pedro Zabala

"Escapement" by J. G. Ballard

Appreciating Gray Foy's Cover Art for Lilith by J. R. Salamanca

The Hucksters by Frederic Wakeman

The Apes of God: Time to Re-Read this Beastly Book in 2017!

The Suspect by L. R. Wright

Tara Henley on Emily Witt's Future Sex

William T. Vollmann ephemera from his publisher for the The Rifles

A. M. Homes' autograph (Jack)

I Left My Grandfather's House by Denton Welch

Rick Harsch's autograph (Arjun & the Good Snake...)

The Adept by Michael McClure

Steve Erickson's autograph & inscription to Frances Kroll Ring (The Sea Came In At Midnight)

The Island of the Dead by Lya Luft