You never know exactly what you’ll find in a Kyle Minor book. Minor has written gripping, haunting fiction — but his latest book, the essay collection How to Disappear and Why, shows a very different side of him. At times formally inventive, at times hauntingly candid, Minor’s new book investigates the concept of disappearance from all angles. We chatted over email about the creation of this new book and the paths that led him there.
This fall brings with it a new edition of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories, published by the Folio Society. This edition includes an introduction by Yoko Ogawa and new illustrations by Yuko Shimizu. I spoke with Shimizu about her work on this edition, her experiences with Hearn’s fiction, and more.
Robert W. Chambers’s visions of the future anticipated some things that have not yet come to pass, including personal booths intended for suicide. (Readers of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s graphic novel Providence will also be familiar with the structures in question.) The title of one of his best-known works points to one of the things he predicted perfectly: The Repairer of Reputations. Nowadays there’s an entire industry dedicated to this; potentially industries, depending on whether you consider online reputation management and crisis PR to be distinct or interwoven.
I met Kyle Winkler at VoidCon last year, where I picked up his novel Enter the Peerless, a work of heady cosmic horror. This fall brings with it the release of his new book The Ship of Death, a book about a board game that might also be a vessel by which uncanny presences can enter the contemporary world; it’s also told through a series of found documents. As someone with a fondness for board games myself, the combination was irresistible and the novel wholly compelling. I chatted with Winkler about the roots of the origins of this novel, subverting horror tropes, and the challenge of creating found documents.
I’ve been an admirer of Grant Maierhofer’s work for years, but my experience of reading his two latest books back to back may be the apex of my experience with his bibliography thus far. Those two books are Synecdoche, New York — an entry in the Timecodes series to which I’m also a contributor — and the book-length essay Serotonin: Writing and Depression. Both books are, in their own way, moving explorations of creativity and mental health. They are candid, often very moving, and haven’t left my brain since I finished them. Maierhofer and I chatted via email about these two books, his larger project, and what’s next for him.
There are many reasons to pick up Greg Tate’s recently-reissued Flyboy in the Buttermilk, beginning with the fact that it’s a triumphant, wide-ranging collection of nonfiction and cultural commentary. Add in the presence of introductions by both Questlove and Hanif Abdurraqib, each of whom does an excellent job of pointing out why Tate’s work mattered when at the time it was written and continues to matter, and you have the makings of a classic returning to print.
The last decade has seen an increase in works from Katherine Dunn’s archive seeing print, from her ruminations on profanity to a posthumous story collection. Dunn’s bibliography covers a lot of thematic territory, and while Geek Love is her best-known work, it’s far from her only book worth discussing. Also notable about Geek Love: among the accolades it’s received is a nomination for the Bram Stoker Award.
Some horror stories play on primal fears and anxieties; others work by creating monsters so unsettling the reader will have no choice but to flinch. David Simmons’s stories often pursue a third path: creating a profound sense of a world where nearly everything has gone wrong, like a trap door carved in morality that you can’t avoid.