Some neat thoughts on inspired creativity drawn from Lewis Hyde and Stephen King, and presented by Terri Windling, whose editorial and authorial contributions to modern fantasy and speculative fiction have been so very valuable: As Hyde explained in his book, The Gift (1983): “The task of setting free one’s gifts was a recognized labor in…
Tag: stephen king
Stephen King on the thing under the bed
There have been moments of insight in Stephen King’s work that legitimately qualify as sublime. This widely quoted passage from his foreword to Night Shift is one of them: At night, when I go to bed I am at pains to be sure that my legs are under the blankets after the lights go out….
On Stephen King and horror as “one of the most literary of all forms”
Here’s a really nice pair of paragraphs expressing a dead-on and truly significant point, from a review by Margaret Atwood (!) of King’s new novel Doctor Sleep, his much-heralded sequel to The Shining: King is right at the center of an American literary taproot that goes all the way down: to the Puritans and their…
Teeming Links – September 20, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word comes from novelist and National Book Award winner Richard Powers, speaking to The Believer magazine in 2007 about the unique value of reading — and specifically, reading fiction — in helping to “deliver us from certainty” during an age when a great deal of evil…
Teeming Links – August 23, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s invocation comes from author and cultural historian Mike Jay, author of last year’s The Influencing Machine, slated for U.S. publication in January 2014 as A Visionary Madness. The article’s tagline states the basic thesis, which articulates an uncanny experience, sensation, and intuition that we’ve all had with…
Teeming Links – August 13, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I invite you to peruse today’s installment of recommended and necessary reading in light of this recent reflection from Walter Kirn, who says his former personal and current authorial involvement with a certain high-profile murderer and impostor has combined synergistically with the rash of apocalyptic awfulness currently infesting…
Stephen King on writing, inner dictation, and his fears for the future of reading
There’s a nifty interview with Stephen King in last weekend’s edition of that bastion of substantive journalism, Parade magazine. It’s actually the cover feature, which knocks the usually fluff-filled magazine up a notch in my (probably immaterial) estimation. Among the highlights are the following points of interest: King explains why he’s not a horror writer:…
Stephen King: We forget that life is fundamentally mysterious
I ask you to consider the fact that we live in a web of mystery, and have simply gotten so used to the fact that we have crossed out the word and replaced it with one we like better, that one being reality. Where do we come from? Where were we before we were here?…
To Suffer This World or Illuminate Another? On the Meanings and Uses of Horror
In his interesting book-length meditation, Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King posited the following theory regarding the intrinsic and perennial appeal of Horror: Why do you want to make up horrible things when there is so much real horror in the world? The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope…