Some Boing Boing readers may know Edward Gorey without knowing it. The author and illustrator of a 100 (or so) ironic-gothic, darkly droll little picture books with titles like The… Read the rest of the article: Edward Gorey's macabre tarot deck from 1966
[Note: disturbing photos below] Lisa Kereszi "has an eye for the kind of detail that makes you feel like slitting your throat," Sarah Boxer writes in her New York Times… Read the rest of the article: Lisa Kereszi's creepy photos of low-budget scare attractions
With guns on the public mind, now might be a good time to read Melancholy Accidents: Three Centuries of Stray Bullets and Bad Luck, an anthology of newspaper accounts of… Read the rest of the article: Book review: Melancholy Accidents
"I want to know exact details, hard information about everything!" J.G. Ballard told an interviewer, in the pre-Internet year of 1982.
Standing in the Mütter Museum of medical oddities, contemplating a neat row of jars, each containing a malformed fetus with spina bifida, Riva Lehrer realized just how easily she, too,… Read the rest of the article: "Monster Imagery Taught Me I Was a Monster": Riva Lehrer on Beauty, Deformity, Disability
In the flurry of obituaries for Sam Shepard, who died last Thursday, at 73, from complications related to Lou Gehrig's disease, the playwright and actor appears in close up, as… Read the rest of the article: Hawk Moon: Sam Shepard's Forgotten First Book
Minimalist and modern-sounding, Man Ray is the sort of name that seems as if it should be outlined in buzzing neon. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia on August 27, 1890,… Read the rest of the article: Chemist of Mysteries: Man Ray's Dream Photos
"The stars look very different today." I've written, on several occasions, though most revealingly here, about glam's desperate importance to those of us marooned in the beige, tract-home nightmare of… Read the rest of the article: The stars look very different today
The legendary Lemony Snicket is headed to the high seas for a new adventure under his other name. But where's he coming from?
Defender, to the death, of Jack Kirby's Fourth World saga. Architect of Philip K. Dick's induction into the Library of America. College drop-out. MacArthur Genius. Comic-book guy. Jonathan Lethem is a man of obscure obsessions and unabashed passions.
The good doctor's tastes illustrate our insecurities about class. Here's what's really on the menu in Bryan Fuller's Hannibal
Guilty pleasures aren't always merely self-loathing elitism or ironic tastelessness. They can also be a sign of genuine ambivalence—a feeling to cherish.
Will Self suffers from "everythingitis." Why aren't we surprised?
Mark Dery shines a light into the literary unconscious of Joanna Ebenstein, director of the Morbid Anatomy Museum.
Mark Dery talks with the critic and psychoanalyst about the terrors of reading.
Mark Dery takes a deep, dark look at the world of Chilopodophobia, compliments of William Burroughs.
In what he calls "an Experiment in Controlled Digression," Mark Dery touches on xenogastronomy, ortolan, Edible Dormouse, Victor Hugo's fondness for rat pâté, rat-baiting as a betting sport in Victorian times, the rat as New York's unofficial mascot, Luis Buñuel's pet rat, scientific research into such pressing questions as whether rats laugh, and whether rats will inherit the Earth as a result of climate change, Dracula's dominion over rats, and of course the (cryptozoological myth? well-documented phenomenon?) of the Rat King.
Author Mark Dery charts America's ecocidal obsession with nice grass
Tolkien, perhaps rightly in marketing terms, though with the insistent literalism that makes writers writers (which is to say: not artists), demanded, of Barbara Remington's cover art for Lord of… Read the rest of the article: Original Ballantine book cover concept art for J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings on eBay
Before Rimbaud, before the Surrealists, there was Nerval (1808 – 1855), living his life as if it were a lucid dream. Of course, it didn't hurt that his mental skies flickered with the chain lightning of madness—bouts of insanity that condemned him to periodic stays in asylums and, ultimately, self-murder.
