John Anthony Bellairs was an American author, best known for his fantasy novel The Face in the Frost and many gothic mystery novels for young adults featuring the characters Lewis Barnavelt, Rose Rita Pottinger, Anthony Monday, and Johnny Dixon.
Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer and artist noted for his illustrated books. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.
The Known World is a 2003 historical novel by Edward P. Jones. Set in Virginia during the antebellum era, it examines the issues regarding the ownership of black slaves by both white and black Americans.
Literary nonsense is a broad categorization of literature that balances elements that make sense with some that do not, with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning. Even though the most well-known form of literary nonsense is nonsense verse, the genre is present in many forms of literature.
The House with a Clock in Its Walls is a 1973 juvenile mystery fiction novel written by John Bellairs and illustrated by Edward Gorey. It is the first in the series of twelve novels featuring the fictional American boy Lewis Barnavelt.
Mark Dery is an American author, lecturer and cultural critic. An early observer and critic of online culture, he helped to popularize the term 'culture jamming' and is generally credited with having coined the term 'Afrofuturism' in his essay "Black to the Future" in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. He writes about media and visual culture, especially fringe elements of culture for a wide variety of publications, from Rolling Stone to BoingBoing.
The Iron Tonic: Or, A Winter Afternoon in Lonely Valley is a Surrealist country-house mystery—that is, a series of clues that do not add up to a solution—written and illustrated by Edward Gorey. It was published in 1969 by Albondoncani Press in a limited edition of 226 copies. It was republished for the trade market by Harcourt, Inc. in the form of a small, hardbound book that is illustrated on both front and back covers.
The Gashlycrumb Tinies: or, After the Outing is an abecedarian book written by Edward Gorey that was first published in 1963. Gorey tells the tale of 26 children and their untimely deaths in rhyming dactylic couplets, accompanied by the author's distinctive black-and-white illustrations. It is one of Edward Gorey's best-known books, and is the most notorious amongst his roughly half-dozen mock alphabets. It has been described as a "sarcastic rebellion against a view of childhood that is sunny, idyllic, and instructive". The morbid humor of the book comes in part from the mundane ways in which children die, such as falling down the stairs or choking on a peach. Far from illustrating the dramatic and fantastical childhood nightmares, these scenarios instead poke fun at the banal paranoias that come as a part of parenting.
Philip Glassborow is a playwright, lyricist and composer who writes for theatre, radio and television. His best-known theatre musical is The Great Big Radio Show! with book in collaboration with Nick McIvor, which was premiered by the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, showcased at the Bridewell Theatre in London, and had additional exposure via the off-Broadway York Theatre Company ‘Musicals in Mufti’ series (2005), and Malta’s National Theatre, Teatru Manoel (2014).
Rhoda Levine is an opera director, choreographer, and a faculty member at several schools of music.
The Gotham Book Mart was a famous Midtown Manhattan bookstore and cultural landmark that operated from 1920 to 2007. The business was located first in a small basement space on West 45th Street near the Theater District, then moved to 51 West 47th Street, then spent many years at 41 West 47th Street within the Diamond District in Manhattan, New York City, before finally moving to 16 East 46th Street. Beyond merely selling books, the store virtually played as a literary salon, hosting meetings of the Finnegans Wake Society, the James Joyce Society, poetry and author readings, art exhibits, and more. It was known for its distinctive sign above the door which read, "Wise Men Fish Here". The store specialized in poetry, literature, books about theater, art, music and dance. It sold both new books as well as out-of-print and rare books.
Rohan O'Grady is the pen name of Vancouver-born Canadian novelist June Margaret O'Grady (Skinner). After graduating from Lord Byng Secondary School in 1940 Skinner worked for the Capilano Golf and Country Club as assistant resident manager, and then in the library at the Vancouver Sun. There she met husband Frederick Snowden Skinner with whom she raised three children in West Vancouver.
Stephen Schiff is an American screenwriter, producer, and journalist. He is best known for his work at The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, his screenplays for Lolita, True Crime, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and his work as a writer and producer on the FX television series The Americans.
All Strange Away is a short prose text by Samuel Beckett first published in English in 1964. A special signed edition with illustrations by Edward Gorey was published in 1976, and in a trade edition by Grove Press of collected texts titled, Rockaby and Other Short Pieces in 1981. Beckett's British publisher, John Calder, also printed the work independently in 1979 and again, in 1990, in a collection of late prose works under the title, As the Story was Told.
Felicia Lamport, was an American poet and satirist who also wrote a column for The Boston Globe called "Muse of the Week in Review". She was particularly well known for her inventive use of the pun.
The Doubtful Guest is a short, illustrated book by Edward Gorey, first published by Doubleday in 1957. It is the third of Gorey's books and shares with his others a sense of the absurd, meticulous cross-hatching, and a seemingly Edwardian setting. The book begins with the sudden appearance of a strange, penguin-like creature in a turn-of-the-century manor house. An aristocratic family struggles to coexist with the creature, who is by turns despondent and mischievous. By the final page, the guest has stayed for seventeen years, and shows "no intention of going away".
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is a novel written by Vendela Vida. The book was first published on 2 January 2007 by Ecco Press. This was Vida's second published novel.
The Object-Lesson (1958) is a picture book by Edward Gorey. A work of surrealist art and literature, it is typical of Gorey's avant-garde style of storytelling, with Victorian and Edwardian-esque line drawings and settings, each described with a sentence fragment which adds to a larger continuous narrative. The pictures and text combine to tell a strange and obscure story. Although internally consistent, coherent, and structured, the story has a disjointed and disorienting quality, with melancholic and morbidly humorous effects.
The Vinegar Works: Three Volumes of Moral Instruction (1963) is a box set of three picture books by Edward Gorey: The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Insect God, and The West Wing, each revolving around themes of death and terror, in the Gothic tradition. The Vinegar Works and its three constituent books can be found in the first of the four collections comprising Gorey's work, Amphigorey (1972).
Seon Manley, was an American editor and author who worked with her sister Gogo Lewis. She worked with the supernatural, tales of suspense, and horror as well as biographies.
