American supernatural tales by S. T. Joshi

Author:S. T. Joshi
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: USA, Fiction - Horror, Fiction, Anthologies, American fiction, Anthologies (non-poetry), American fiction - 21st century, Anthologies (multiple authors), American Horror Fiction, Horror, Fiction - General, Horror & Ghost Stories, Genre Fiction, Occult, American, Horror - General, Occult fiction, Short stories, American fiction - 20th century, Literary, American Short Story Collections, Fantasy fiction, 20th century, General, Fantasy, Occult & Supernatural
ISBN: 9780143105046
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2007-10-02T07:00:00+00:00

FRITZ LEIBER

Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr., was born in Chicago in 1910. He was the son of a noted actor, Fritz Leiber, Sr., and he himself appeared sporadically in plays and films. Shortly after his marriage in 1936 to Jonquil Stephens, Leiber came in touch with H. P. Lovecraft, with whom he had a brief but influential correspondence. Leiber began publishing tales of fantasy, science fiction, and horror in the late 1930s. Many of them focus around a pair of characters named Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, loosely based upon himself and his friend Harry O. Fischer; these jaunty, self-deprecating tales established the subgenre of sword-and-sorcery as a viable literary form. Leiber’s first book, the short story collection Night’s Black Agents (1947), was the first in a long succession of publications that would establish Leiber as one of the premier authors of science fiction and fantasy since Lovecraft. Among his achievements are the novel Conjure Wife (1943), a deft updating of the witchcraft legend; The Sinful Ones (1953), a novel of existential terror; and the futuristic novel The Big Time (1958). Leiber definitively modernized the supernatural tale by setting it in the present-day amid the common landmarks of urban civilization, as in such tales as “The Automatic Pistol” (1940) and “Smoke Ghost” (1941); this tendency reached its pinnacle in the late novel Our Lady of Darkness (1977), set in the San Francisco that was Leiber’s home for decades prior to his death in 1992. Leiber was the recipient of every major award in the fields of fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (first published in The Girl with the Hungry Eyes, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, 1949) is representative of Leiber’s updating of supernatural tropes: in this account of a woman who exercises a fatal sexual lure upon men by the ubiquitous presence of her image on billboards and other advertising, Leiber has transformed the traditional vampire of legend into a kind of “psychic vampirism” that does not require the sucking of blood to engender its effects. Written in a clipped, Hemingwayesque prose, the story is a masterful exposition of the temptations of the “eternal feminine.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.