Wormwood: Writings about fantasy, supernatural and decadent literature is a magazine of literature and literary criticism, edited by Mark Valentine, and published semi-annually since 2003 by Tartarus Press. [1] The first issue appeared in August 2003. [2]
As the subtitle indicates, the magazine focuses on fantasy and decadence, and especially on European authors of the past two centuries. Most of the selections are criticism articles or book reviews, although some previously unpublished fiction has recently appeared. Issues 1-14 featured a column titled "The Decadent World-View" by Brian Stableford, analyzing texts which provided particular influence on the French Decadents, particularly Charles Baudelaire.
Arthur Machen was the pen-name of Arthur Llewellyn Jones, a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language." He is also well known for "The Bowmen", a short story that was widely read as fact, creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.
Billy Martin, known professionally as Poppy Z. Brite, is an American author. He initially achieved notoriety in the gothic horror genre of literature in the early 1990s by publishing a string of successful novels and short story collections. His later work moved into the genre of dark comedy, with many stories set in the New Orleans restaurant world. Martin's novels are typically standalone books but may feature recurring characters from previous novels and short stories. Much of his work features openly bisexual and gay characters.
Wormwood may refer to:
Robert Fordyce Aickman was an English writer and conservationist. As a conservationist, he co-founded the Inland Waterways Association, a group which has preserved from destruction and restored England's inland canal system. As a writer, he is best known for his supernatural fiction, which he described as "strange stories".
John Davys Beresford was an English writer, now remembered for his early science fiction and some short stories in the horror story and ghost story genres. Beresford was a great admirer of H.G. Wells, and wrote the first critical study of Wells in 1915. His Wellsian novel The Hampdenshire Wonder was a major influence on Olaf Stapledon. His other science-fiction novels include The Riddle of the Tower, about a dystopian, hive-like society.
Tartarus Press is an independent book publisher based near Leyburn, Yorkshire, UK.
Wormwood: A Drama of Paris is an 1890 novel by Marie Corelli. It tells the sensational story of a Frenchman, Gaston Beauvais, driven to murder and ruin by the potent alcoholic drink absinthe.
Sheree Renée Thomas is an American writer, book editor, publisher, and contributor to many notable publications. In 2020, Thomas was named editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
The Decadent movement was a late-19th-century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality. The visual artist Félicien Rops's body of work and Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel Against Nature (1884) are considered the prime examples of the decadent movement. It first flourished in France and then spread throughout Europe and to the United States. The movement was characterized by self-disgust, sickness at the world, general skepticism, delight in perversion, and employment of crude humor and a belief in the superiority of human creativity over logic and the natural world. Central to the decadent movement was the view that art is totally opposed to nature in the sense both of biological nature and of the standard, or "natural", norms of morality and sexual behaviour.
Reggie Oliver is an English playwright, biographer and writer of ghost stories.
The Savoy was a magazine of literature, art, and criticism published in eight numbers from January to December 1896 in London. It featured work by authors such as W. B. Yeats, Max Beerbohm, Joseph Conrad, Aubrey Beardsley and William Thomas Horton. Only eight issues of the magazine were published: two quarterly and six monthly (July-December). The publisher was Leonard Smithers, a controversial friend of Oscar Wilde who was also known as a pornographer. Among other publications by Smithers were rare erotic works and unique items such as books bound in human skin.
The Mahogany Tree was a weekly literary magazine published from January until December 1892. The magazine was based in Boston.
The works of J. R. R. Tolkien, especially The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, have become extremely popular, and have exerted considerable influence since their publication. A culture of fandom sprang up in the 1960s, leading to many popular votes in favour of the books, but acceptance by the literary establishment has been slower. Literary hostility to Tolkien developed with The Lord of the rings and continued until the start of the 21st century. Meanwhile, academic studies on Tolkien's works have been appearing at an increasing pace since the mid-1980s, prompting a thorough literary re-evaluation of his work.
Benjamin J. Szumskyj is an Australian who used to be an editor, author and critic of weird fiction, horror and fantasy literature. Since becoming a Christian, he has written non-fiction regarding Christianity.
Samuel R. Delany, nicknamed "Chip", is an American author and literary critic. His work includes fiction, memoir, criticism and essays on science fiction, literature, sexuality, and society.
Mark Valentine is an English short story author, editor and essayist on book-collecting.
Rosalie Parker is an author, scriptwriter and editor who runs the Tartarus Press with R.B. Russell.
Angela Slatter is a writer based in Brisbane, Australia. Primarily working in the field of speculative fiction, she has focused on short stories since deciding to pursue writing in 2005, when she undertook a Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing. Since then she has written a number of short stories, many of which were included in her two compilations, Sourdough and Other Stories (2010) and The Girl With No Hands and other tales (2010).
John Howard is an English author, born in London in 1961. His fiction has appeared in anthologies, magazines, and the collections The Silver Voices, Written by Daylight, Cities and Thrones and Powers, and Buried Shadows. The majority of Howard's stories have central and eastern European settings; many are set in the fictional Romanian town of Steaua de Munte. The Defeat of Grief is a novella set in Steaua de Munte and the real Black Sea resort of Balcic; the novellas "The Fatal Vision" and The Lustre of Time form part of an ongoing series with Steaua de Munte architect and academic Cristian Luca as protagonist. Numbered as Sand or the Stars attempts a 'secret history' of Hungary between the World Wars.