Robert Frost was afraid of the dark. He was scared of storms and petrified of prowlers when he penned an iconic poem about the darkest night of winter.
I think of this as I drive through the foothills of the Green Mountains in South Shaftsbury, Vt., en route to the red-gabled stone house where the blue-eyed poet wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in 1922, about a traveler who halts his horse to watch the snow fall.
Edgar Allan Poe was a remarkably versatile writer who ventured across many fields of interest. He was an editor and literary critic. He penned the first detective stories in the style readers recognize today, making him Agatha Christie’s spiritual ancestor. And, of course, he wrote what are perhaps the most iconic horror stories in the American literary canon. What’s less known about Poe is that he was also an enthusiast of the sciences, and besides dabbling in physics and cryptography and incorporating them into his work, he also wrote a book about seashells.
Already a hit in the US, where it has been compared to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Katy Hays’s debut novel is about tarot, obsession, academic jealousy and Renaissance magic. This subject matter will intrigue many and discourage others. I was initially in the latter category, but it turns out that Hays is a writer who can skilfully navigate the narrow territory between suspense and melodrama.
An archive is both a living and a dead thing; it is the record of a person's life, left behind after they die, but it also changes shape constantly as it is developed and leafed through by researchers. This sort of doubleness haunts Elizabeth Hoover's debut, "The Archive Is All in Present Tense," as if the author were constantly driven to show us the ways in which these planes collide as the book takes on the roots of selfhood as a research project.