The tenth essay in my Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series, which looks at Lin Carter's curious non-fiction study Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings (1969), a book that helped pave the way for the BAF series.
Tag: Genre: Nonfiction
Reading “Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination” by Jon Greenaway
John Greenaway's Capitalism: A Horror Story is a careful, clever, and thorough work of Marxist and especially Marxist utopian theory, offering a history of the Gothic Marxist intellectual tradition and careful readings of circa two dozens horror films and novels that raises questions about the politics of genre.
Reading “The Hittites” by Damien Stone and “Nubia” by Sarah M. Schellinger (Lost Civilizations)
This essay responds to two recent introductory histories of two fascinating, and very different, ancient civilizations: Damien Stone's The Hittites and Sarah M. Schellinger's Nubia, which published by Reaktion in the Lost Civilizations series. The essay makes the case for why genre studies needs to read ancient history.
Reading “African History for Beginners” by Herb Boyd
Herb Boyd’s African History for Beginners (1991) may not be an African history worth reading for African history, but it is an important, illustrative, and eccentrically illustrated example of an attempt to create a popular history textbook in the Afrocentric mold for a mass audience.
Reading “Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects” by Marc Olivier
Marc Olivier's Household Horror is a study of the material networks of household objects in the domestic world of more than a dozen horror films, and also an argument for why object-oriented ontology is a terrible and terribly useless theoretical project.
Reading “The Silent War in Tibet” by Lowell Thomas, Jr.
In Lowell Thomas, Jr.'s 1959 book The Silent War in Tibet, Tibet’s turbulent history in the 1950s is told with the pressing excitement of a narrator who wants readers to understand the confluence of local, regional, and global forces at work in the People Republic of China's occupation and annexation of Tibet.
Reading “The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence” by Martin Meredith
Martin Meredith's The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence is an unparalleled resource for introducing the major issues, figures, and periods of post-independence African history, but is severely marred by its failure to engage the devastating legacies of colonialism on the continent.
Reading “India: A Short History” by Andrew Robinson
Andrew Robinson's India: A Short History is a worthwhile and chronologically balance, but critically flawed, abbreviation of 5,000 years of Indian history that raises questions about how best to tell such a complicated story in such a short span.
Reading “The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales” by Nicholas Jubber
Nicholas Jubber’s The Fairy Tellers steps into the world of fairy tales that are well-known across the West to recover the stories behind those tales’ tellers, but in doing so obscures the scholarship that made this book possible.
Reading “The End: Surviving the World through Imagined Disasters” by Katie Goh
Goh's The End: Surviving the World through Imagined Disasters—a brilliant and fun exploration of (post)apocalyptic narratives across a range of subgenres and political concerns—is academic in rigor, creative in style, journalistic in accessibility, and activist in energy.
Genre Fantasies 