Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic and author known for his long-running column at The Washington Post Book World. A wide-ranging literary essayist, he contributed reviews and essays to The Weekly Standard from 2001 to 2018, covering topics spanning Victorian literature, ghost stories, humor, and classic fiction. He is the author of several books on reading and literary appreciation.
Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22 at the age of 88, lived most of her adult life in Portland, Oregon, where she and her husband Charles—who taught French at the local university—quietly brought up their three children. I suspect that Le Guin, who herself majored in French at Radcliffe, must…
Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22 at the age of 88, lived most of her adult life in Portland, Oregon, where she and her husband Charles—who taught French at the local university—quietly brought up their three children. I suspect that Le Guin, who herself majored in French at Radcliffe, must…
Is it perverse to find ghost stories relaxing, even restful? Compared with the grim realities of the news and the appalling horrors of the last hundred years, even such outstanding classics as M. R. James’s “Count Magnus,” Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar,” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener”…
Now that the latest season of Game of Thrones has ended, fans of the show may be wondering: What now? How do I fill the void? One could, of course, reread George R. R. Martin’s books, or check out Maurice Druon’s The Accursed Kings, a series of seven historical novels that partly inspired Martin.…
Even the most devoted Baker Street Irregular or Baker Street Babe must have trouble keeping up with the frenetic celebration of Sherlock Holmes and his creator Arthur Conan Doyle—the movies and TV series, the volumes of letters and diaries, the special editions of the canonical stories, the…
Even the most devoted Baker Street Irregular or Baker Street Babe must have trouble keeping up with the frenetic celebration of Sherlock Holmes and his creator Arthur Conan Doyle—the movies and TV series, the volumes of letters and diaries, the special editions of the canonical stories, the…
In 1882, a Minnesota writer and politician named Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, perhaps the most popular work of pseudo-science of the 19th century. Its opening pages confidently set forth 13 propositions about the legendary island kingdom—notably that Atlantis was…
Every year, during the bleak months of winter, I try to read some ghost stories. Since mine is a gentle, pacific nature, I prefer classic tales, mainly from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Gruesomeness, in my view, ought to be kept entirely offstage. A reader’s imagination alone, under the…
Outside the afternoon had already grown sunless and gray as we settled into our seats in eighth-grade English class. Our teacher, without preamble, carefully lowered the tone arm on a rackety portable record player. There was a scratchy pause, and then, unforgettably, we heard a low and sonorous,…
On some now-forgotten weekend back in the 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief was shown on television. By the time it was over, a certain 14-year-old in Lorain, Ohio, yearned to be John Robie, aka The Cat. Played by Cary Grant, this retired jewel thief lived in the south of France, could…
On some now-forgotten weekend back in the 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief was shown on television. By the time it was over, a certain 14-year-old in Lorain, Ohio, yearned to be John Robie, aka The Cat. Played by Cary Grant, this retired jewel thief lived in the south of France, could…
It’s a Saturday afternoon in 1955, and I am sitting with my father in the Palace Theater in Lorain, Ohio. I am 7 years old, and we are waiting for the start of a war movie called To Hell and Back. It is, my dad tells me, a true story, and the hero is a real hero playing himself. His name, I learned…
In Unutterable Horror, his deeply knowledgeable, lively, and unabashedly opinionated history of supernatural fiction, S. T. Joshi suggests that a taste for ghost stories and weird tales is far more than a slavering hunger for blood and grue. The most important supernatural fiction doesn’t merely…
Oh, for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy.
My quest for Symons—A. J. A. Symons, that is—began when, many years ago, I first read that strange novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904). Written by the so-called Baron Corvo, and admired by D. H. Lawrence, among others, the book opens with a magnificent description of a hack writer suffering from…
They wouldn’t have much to say to each other at a dinner party, but there are few more delightful young women in modern literature than Miss Lorelei Lee and Miss Flora Poste, the indomitable, and conniving, heroines of two of the best comic novels of all time, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and…
William Golding
In a lifetime of reading, I ve seldom encountered a stranger book than Herbert Read s The Green Child. It overturns every expectation and keeps the reader constantly off-kilter, with one surprising twist after another, starting with its brilliant opening paragraph: The assassination of President…
Graham Greene
Not long ago, I acquired for seven dollars a handsome Oxford University Press edition, published in 1937, of Macaulay's Literary Essays. For years I had been meaning to read more of this acknowledged master of English prose, best known for his classic History of England. This was, after all, Thomas…
Every Book Its Reader
Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories
H.P. Lovecraft
The Collected Jorkens
Augustus Carp, Esq.