Saturday 21 May 2016

Bibliography and Compilation of Blurbs by Thomas Ligotti


I have just published online my compilation of over 50 blurbs by Thomas Ligotti. This compilation is a small project I started while working on an extensive up-to-date bibliography of Thomas Ligotti’s works as bonus material for the Polish edition of Teatro Grottesco. I was expected to compile a list of English-language publications, whilst the translator Mateusz Kopacz was responsible for the list of publications that appeared in Poland.

The Last Balcony by D. F. Lewis


Highly sophisticated and wonderfully nightmarish imagination, an expertly controlled and sardonic vision that reminds me as much of avant-gardists like William Burroughs as it does the best traditions of horror literature.
-- Thomas Ligotti on D. F. Lewis in DAGON DFL SPECIAL 

In 2011, together with S. D. Tullis I was invited by the award-winning avant-garde author D. F. Lewis to help him choose stories for his collection The Last Balcony.
This was a very difficult choice as Des' oeuvres span over 2000 stories, most of which have been posted online in the so-called Weirdmonger Wheel - a web of websites, blogs and discussion forum posts where the stories are scattered.

Thursday 12 May 2016

"Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies" by Tommaso Landolfi

Two quotes from "Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies" by Tommaso Landolfi, a story relevant to this blog:

“A language reconstructed on the basis of meager inscriptions does not acquire substance until one proves that, on the basis of those inscriptions, that language and only that language could be reconstructed. But in our case, on the basis of so fragile a collection of data, it might be possible to construct or reconstruct not one but a hundred languages. Thus one would be confronted by the amusing case of a piece of poetry which could have been written in any one of a hundred languages, each dissimilar from the others and from the first…”

Thursday 5 May 2016

Thomas Ligotti's works in Poland - better late than never



In 2012-2014 I was invited to participate in the endeavor of introducing the works of Thomas Ligotti to the readers in Poland. I initially teamed up with Mateusz Kopacz, the Polish translator of many titles related to weird fiction, including S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, Koszmary i fantazje. Listy i eseje (a collection of letters and essays by H.P. Lovecraft) and Cthulhu-Mythos-themed collection by Robert E. Howard, Królestwo cieni i inne opowiadania z mitologii Cthulhu.
After having two of Ligotti's stories successfully translated and published, Mateusz joined forces with 3 other Ligottians, including Wojciech Gunia, Filip Skutela, Aleksander Więckowski, who have been working on the translations of Teatro Grottesco for some time. This collaboration resulted in the Polish edition of the author’s major collection published by Okultura.

Here is a short description of the contents of the book in English. Apart from the introduction by Wojciech Gunia and me, the book contains a new foreword by the author, so far only published in Polish, cover art by Serhiy Krykun and interior illustrations by Radosław Włodarski.

The Collected Fiction of D. F. Lewis

I am pasting this from elsewhere, to have all of  the "self-publications" in one place:

I hereby present a series of books I created (for personal use) back in 2008-09 collecting the stories by D. F. Lewis that formed, at the time, 99% of the impenetrable Weirdmoger Wheel. Being an obsessive collector, I gave the series the title "The Collected Fiction of D. F. Lewis," which obviously doesn't mean "complete". And indeed, it is obvious, it will never be possible to publish a complete collection of fiction by the author. Even my series from 2008-09 spans 10 volumes out of the planned 13. I still hope to find time one day to complete the three missing ones. Regardless of when this will happen (if ever), I thought it's about time I posted pictures of this collection on the thread that started it all.