Books about books can be curious things, and fall into a number of categories. Over at Compass Books we have a whole array of books about writing books, which are decidedly helpful for anyone thinking about getting started.
Books are a big part of the intellectual life of any given
culture. Sometimes looking back over certain works of fiction can help put an era in perspective or make sense of a culture shift.
Pagan Portals – Nature Mystics traces the lives and work of ten writers who contributed to the cultural environment that allowed Modern Paganism to develop and flourish throughout the twentieth
century. John Keats, Mary Webb, Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Townsend Warner, D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth von Arnim, W.B. Yeats, Mary Butts, J.R.R. Tolkien and E. Nesbit.
Our contemporary horror
stories are written in a world where there seems little faith, lost hope, and no salvation. All that remains is the fragmentary and occasionally lyrical testimony of the human being struggling to
confront its lack of reason for being in the vast cosmos. This is the terrain of the horror genre.
Eugene Thacker explores this situation in Tentacles Longer Than Night. Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Thacker considers the relationship between philosophy and the horror genre. But instead of taking fiction as the mere illustration of ideas, Thacker reads horror stories as if they themselves were works of philosophy, driven by a speculative urge to question human knowledge and the human-centric view of the world, ultimately leading to the limit of the human - thought undermining itself, in thought.
Tentacles Longer Than Night is the third volume of the "horror of philosophy" trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the second volume, Starry Speculative
Corpse.
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