Tag: chinamieville

Literary

5 Weird Fiction Authors

Not sure what to add next to your reading pile?

Charles Baudelaire.
Portrait of Baudelaire, painted in 1844 by Emile Deroy (1820–1846)

French. You’ll probably like his work if you enjoy Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas de Quincey and Emanuel Swedenborg. Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a 19th century French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du Mal; (1857; The Flowers of Evil) which was perhaps the most important and influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his Petits poèmes en prose (1868; “Little Prose Poems”) was the most successful and innovative early experiment in prose poetry of the time. – Goodreads
Mike Russell. British. You’ll probably like his work if you enjoy Philip K. Dick, Angela Carter, Algernon Blackwood and Franz Kafka. Mike Russell is a British author best known for his books Nothing Is Strange, Strange Medicine and Strungballs. – Goodreads
Nothing Is Strange by Mike Russell
Matthew Lewis. British. You’ll probably like his work if you enjoy Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley. Matthew Gregory Lewis was an English novelist and dramatist, often referred to as “Monk” Lewis, because of the success of his classic Gothic novel, The Monk. – Goodreads
The Monk (Oxford World’s Classics)
China Mieville. British. You’ll probably like his work if you enjoy J.G. Ballard, Michael de Larrabeiti, Thomas Disch and William Durbin. A British “fantastic fiction” writer. – Goodreads. He’s the fifteenth most followed author on Goodreads, with over 200,000 book ratings. Titles include Embassytown, Un Lun Dun and Railsea.
Howard Wandrei.
MURPHY: THE COLLECTED FANTASY TALES OF HOWARD WANDREI VOLUME II

American. You’ll probably like his work if you enjoy William Peter Blatty and Shirley Jackson. Howard Elmer Wandrei was a US artist and writer. – Goodreads

Literary

10 Weird Fiction Quotes

No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural—so far and for such a time that it is a relief to say what we have been trying with our all not to say: We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us. – Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference. – Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (Penguin Classics)

4. Storytelling is a way of turning the world inside out, which I believe it desperately needs. – Mike Russell

5. I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth – they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn’t feel fair. – China Mieville

7. In one picture, the pool was half hidden by a fringe of mace- weeds, and the dead willow was leaning across it at a prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters. Beyond, the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots as if in eternal effort. In the other drawing, the pool formed the main portion of the foreground, with the skeleton tree looming drearily at one side. At the water’s farther end, the cat-tails seemed to wave and whisper among themselves in a dying wind; and the steeply barring slope of pine at the meadow’s terminus was indicated as a wall of gloomy green that closed in the picture, leaving only a pale of autumnal sky at the top. – Clark Ashton Smith, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

9. The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die. These aims are hateful to the government, which values ever frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright. – Fritz Leiber, The Wanderer

10. But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be. – Iain Banks

What’s your favourite Weird Fiction quote? Please share 🙂