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09/12/2026

In 1873, Warner and Mark Twain published their co-authored book The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today which gave that era of American history its name. Charles Dudley Warner is known for making the famous remark,

“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” This was quoted by Mark Twain in a lecture, and is still commonly misattributed to Twain.

Warner traveled widely, lectured frequently, and was actively interested in prison reform, city park supervision, and other movements for the public good.

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09/07/2026

“A woman who is born with a nose so beaky she may use it to spear cocktail olives, and a brow so high it surely could not house anything other than a scarily massive brain, must make a sartorial decision early on in life and stick to it.”

The choice was as follows. Either she could dress meekly in twin sets and beige stockings and attempt to disappear. Or she could embrace her oddities and rush headlong towards the door marked Fancy Dress Department.

Edith Sitwell took the second approach

Like her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, Edith reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents, and lived for much of her life with her governess. She never married but became passionately attached to the gay Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was unfailingly generous and helpful.

Sitwell published poetry continuously from 1913, some of it abstract and set to music. With her dramatic style and exotic costumes, she was sometimes labeled a poseur, but her work was praised for its solid technique and painstaking craftsmanship.

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09/06/2026

“You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.”

Robert Pirsig is an American writer and philosopher, and the author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals.

Ostensibly a first-person narrative based on a motorcycle trip he and his young son Chris took from Minneapolis to San Francisco, it is an exploration of the underlying metaphysics of western culture.

Pirsig's work consists most notably of two novels. The better known, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, develops around Pirsig's exploration into the nature of "Quality". Pirsig finds in "Quality" a special significance and common ground between Western and Eastern world views.

Because he was a precocious child, with an I.Q. of 170 at age 9, Robert Pirsig skipped several grades and was enrolled at the Blake School in Minneapolis. At 15, Pirsig was awarded a high school diploma and entered the University of Minnesota to study biochemistry that autumn. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he described the central character, thought to represent him, as being far from a typical student; he was interested in science as a goal in itself, rather than as a way to establish a career.

Along the journey he gives the reader a short summary of the history of philosophy, including his interpretation of the philosophy of Socrates as part of an ongoing dispute between "cosmologists" admitting the existence of a Universal Truth and the Sophists, opposed by Socrates and his student Plato.

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09/04/2026

Richard Wright (1908–1960) transformed American literature by writing directly about race, poverty, violence, and the forces shaping Black life in twentieth-century America.

His landmark novel Native Son (1940) and memoir Black Boy (1945) brought experiences often excluded from mainstream American literature before a vast reading public. Unflinching and sometimes controversial, Wright’s work challenged readers to confront the social conditions behind racial inequality and helped open the way for generations of Black American writers.

“I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.”

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09/02/2026

Ray Bradbury once called Tarzan’s creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.”

Even though not many people read Burroughs’ original novels anymore, Tarzan remains a lasting character. There are a few reasons for this: Tarzan embodies the classic ‘noble savage’ archetype, a concept that appears throughout literature but is perhaps most famously captured by Burroughs. The idea of leaving behind modern civilization to return to a primitive existence in the jungle resonates with many, capturing the imaginations of both readers and moviegoers.

While Burroughs' works are still popular today, he didn’t receive much critical praise during his lifetime. Critics often dismissed his writing as poorly crafted and chauvinistic, citing unbelievable plots, flat characters, questionable science, too many nested flashbacks, and overly virtuous heroes battling excessively evil villains.

However, by the 1960s, Burroughs had published over 60 books, selling more than 50 million copies. His works continue to be published, and a new generation is discovering them, largely thanks to media promotion and movies like Disney’s animated "Tarzan."

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08/20/2026

THE COSMIC HORROR OF H. P. LOVECRAFT
‘Dagon’ and Other Macabre Tales
H. P. Lovecraft • Arkham House • 1987
“Searchers after horror haunt strange far places.”

Which Lovecraft are you reading?
This important Arkham House edition presents S. T. Joshi’s corrected text, returning to Lovecraft’s surviving manuscripts and restoring wording and punctuation altered in earlier editions.

A cornerstone collection of cosmic dread, forbidden knowledge, ancient powers—and the stories that helped define modern weird fiction.

Fine in Near Fine Dust Jacket
From Blind Horse Books ABAA --- $120 shipped domestically.

Full description and purchase here: https://bit.ly/4xc1J8I

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08/20/2026

Remembering H. P. Lovecraft, author of horror tales on his birthday.

H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction whose reputation grew dramatically after his death. Working largely outside the literary mainstream and publishing much of his fiction in pulp magazines, he developed a distinctive form of cosmic horror in which humanity confronts ancient forces and a universe vast, indifferent, and largely unknowable.

His best-known story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” became central to what is now known as the Cthulhu Mythos—a loosely connected fictional universe of forbidden knowledge, ancient beings, strange cults, and cosmic dread. Lovecraft's mythology continued to expand after his death as other writers adopted and reinterpreted its characters, creatures, and ideas.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life there and made New England an essential part of his fictional landscape. Despite the lasting power of that imagined world, literary success largely escaped him. He struggled financially, never supported himself comfortably through his writing, and died in 1937 at only forty-six.
His posthumous influence, however, has been extraordinary. Stephen King called Lovecraft “the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale,” while Joyce Carol Oates described his influence on later generations of horror writers as “incalculable.”

From a writer known principally to readers of pulp magazines emerged one of the defining imaginations of twentieth-century supernatural fiction—and a literary mythology that continues to inspire writers, filmmakers, artists, and readers nearly ninety years after his death.

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08/18/2026

Brian Aldiss was one of the major voices of postwar British science fiction, a writer whose career began, appropriately enough, among books. While working as a bookseller in Oxford, he began writing a column about life in the trade; his early literary success soon led him toward the science fiction that would establish his international reputation.

Aldiss emerged as an important figure in the British New Wave, helping push science fiction beyond conventional adventure narratives toward more experimental, psychologically complex, and literary forms. Over a career spanning more than six decades, he wrote novels, short stories, criticism, poetry, and histories of the genre, while also championing science fiction as serious literature.

His fiction ranged widely, from the strange evolutionary world of Hothouse and the generation-starship society of Non-Stop to the immense planetary cycles of the Helliconia trilogy. His imagination was often less concerned with predicting machines
than with examining what technological and social change might do to human beings.

One small story would have an especially long afterlife. “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” first published in 1969, explored artificial intelligence, loneliness, and the human need for love. Stanley Kubrick spent years developing it for film before the project eventually became Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

Aldiss received the title of SFWA Grand Master in 1999, recognition of a career that helped broaden both the ambitions and the literary possibilities of science fiction.

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08/16/2026

A prolific underground writer who used his poetry and prose to depict the depravity of urban life and the downtrodden in American society.

A cult hero, Bukowski relied on experience, emotion, and imagination in his work, using direct language, often violent and s*xual imagery. While some critics found his style offensive, others claimed that Bukowski satirized the machismo attitude through his routine use of s*x, alcohol abuse, and violence.

Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, "the secret of Bukowski's appeal. . . [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.”

His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambiance of his home city of Los Angeles. His work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work.

Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over 60 books. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, in the LA underground newspaper Open City.

Since his death in 1994, Bukowski has been the subject of a number of critical articles and books about both his life and writings, yet his work has received relatively little attention from academic critics.

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08/06/2026

Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as "Break, Break, Break", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears", and "Crossing the Bar". Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as Ulysses.

Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, "Ulysses", and "Tithonus".

A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplaces of the English language, including: "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all"; …."Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die"; …… "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure", …… "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield"; …. "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers"; ….."The old order changeth, yielding place to new"; and ….."Nature, red in tooth and claw" ;

Which is what he is perhaps best know for from numerous High School English classes is “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred………

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