If you like horror, I'd highly recommend Evenson. In general I really dislike the phrase "literary horror," but his work fits in that groove, in a good way.

That's cool! I'd definitely contribute to that. I love Clark Ashton Smith's writing so much.

This is a good observation! And, thinking on it, what's ironic is that this kind of purism springs from an insecurity about genre: if they weren't fretting about questions of legitimacy, they wouldn't waste time defining away anything deemed subpar.

I agree. When I say that Lovecraft in no way qualifies as "literary," I don't mean that as an insult. There's a lot to enjoy about his writing (racism aside) even if his prose style is… well, idiosyncratic at best. (He has been studied extensively by academics - take ST Joshi [please] - but I'm not sure that confers…

While it's true that she's often labeled a Gothicist, I think the range of her work is actually a lot wider than that. You could easily put her stories into a Year's Best [insert random horror subgenre] collection under a pseudonym and nobody would bat an eyelid.

That kind of genre purism bugs me too, especially since fantasy and science fiction aren't binary; they're a continuum. For example, something like Star Wars sits right in the middle of the two. It can be both! And, as the dying earth subgenre brilliantly proves, you can make hard SF look indistinguishable from…

Is it really true that few people outside of SF have heard of Ellison? At one point (admittedly ~40 years ago) he was one of the most well-known authors around, and surely lots of people have read I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. As for literary status, I think Ellison definitely thought of his own work that way (cf …

Agreed, that's definitely a frustrating paradigm in the publishing industry. And many authors are never allowed to graduate above the genre label regardless of quality. Take someone like Gene Wolfe, who is probably the finest pure prose stylist I've ever read. He'll never be classified as "literary," which is more the…

Oates is awesome. She's written lots of short story collections & novels that have been unambiguously labeled as horror/gothic/dark fantasy, and she often discusses her love of genre.

I felt similarly about Atwood when she made those claims. It's especially rich of her to be so dismissive of science fiction since genre fans openly embraced Handmaid's Tale (which is also unambiguously science fiction) and were part of the reason for its success.

This sounds like a good collection! I'd say that Weisman's defensiveness is misplaced - the issue isn't one of mainstream literary authors dabbling in genre, but rather that many mainstream authors actually are writing in genre without acknowledging it. Eg, Lethem has written multiple novels that easily qualify as…

Wait until he finds out that a cosine wave is just a shifted sine wave. *mind blown*

Very excited. I love South Korean horror so YES PLEASE

I'm not sure what's inexplicable about the success of these movies. They a) feature a truly multicultural cast (sadly all too rare in Hollywood) and b) are loads of fun. I'm very excited for what The Rock and his weird beard are cooking up for #8.

Yeah, it makes absolutely no sense. If I understand correctly, they had no prenup, and he's worth a lot more than she is; so even if she were just in it for the money (which of course she isn't) there would be no reason to go through this.

The pictures alluded to in the article are popping up all over the place - they even showed up unexpectedly in my Google news feed. Ugh. I feel so awful for her, but I'm glad she's getting out of that marriage post haste.

It might be a poorly-chosen name, but it does describe a legitimate genre (Beth Orton, Bibio, Frog Pocket, Greg Davis, Christopher Willits, etc). Not sure why people are mad about a name for a real genre that exists.

I'm pretty sure Clown has been out in the UK for over a year now, so this won't be as much of a surprise to them. In any event, I enjoyed this movie; if I didn't know Watts made Cop Car after this I would have thought it was the other way around since Clown is a much better movie.

I think the remake is great. It really is its own movie, deviating significantly from the original like the best remakes do.

God, I love this album so much. This record, and their next record Rock Collection, are woefully underrated - very few bands were ever as good as them at this kind of crunchy, off-kilter songwriting. I saw them live shortly before they broke up and they were amazing. Sadly they were a casualty, like many bands of the…