I first discovered Arthur Machen via H.P. Lovecraft. Machen, a lover of the occult and all things supernatural, was a strong influence on Lovecraft’s brooding, claustraphobic horror style. Lovecraft’s short stories are wonderful in their ability to quickly evoke an atmosphere of dread. However, their ornate wording can be dense and a little over the top at times…

And there was something else that I didn’t realize about the author until coming across it in Stephen King’s excellent On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In a passage on writing dialogue, King noted

Ok, this one’s a little tough to classify, and many would argue it is not art at all.
What is art anyway? Is it enough if it is something stranger than the norm? Well decide for yourself after taking a look at Damon Zucconi’s sometimesredsometimesblue. (You may need to hit refresh …

It’s a good time for Indian writers who write in English. An exotic location (at least to people who don’t live there) mixed with philosophical/social/historical insights, mixed with some poetic substance and the obligatory magic-realism adds up to ching! ching! in the Western book market.

But Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s debut would be a little more stunning if you didn’t feel it had been done before by Arundhati Roy. Love it or hate it, The God of Small Things’s (TGOST) Booker win brought more attention to the genre and you get a feeling of deja vu.

Entitled Head On, artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibit consists of a pack of wolves which trot up resolutely toward their fate. As the work progresses, the viewer witnesses the pack exploding out in force, slamming against a barrier and finally dying in a heap of twisted bodies.
The “dogged” animals are surprisingly …

This one has been circulating in chain letters for awhile, but I felt I had to revive it…
Icaro Doria, a Brazillian artist, created a “Meet the World” campaign which takes the flags of several nations and then uses their colors to illustrate sobering statistics. Just as a picture can be …