13thFloor

Really thoughtful piece by Dennis Lim on the relationship between ghosts and cinema. Excerpts:...

The world is full of museums that don’t exist fully in three dimensions – museums described in words or drawn on paper; museum catalogues; museums on the web. There are also many museums that are the creation of artists, novelists and poets, and so have a strong thread of imagination running through them. The latter cast an...

Gritty and heartbreaking, this 1970s collection from the master of gekiga, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, was published in English in 2006....

It can't rain all the time....

Opening Statement of Mr. Harold Schoff, attorney for Mr. Coyote: My client, Mr. Wile E. Coyote, a resident of Arizona and contiguous states, does hereby bring suit for damages against the Acme Company, manufacturer and retail distributor of assorted merchandise, incorporated in Delaware and doing business in every state,...

It rains a lot, up here; there are winter days when it doesn’t really get light at all, only a bright, indeterminate gray. But then there are days when it’s like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sunlit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God’s own movie. It was like that the day her...

During her many years of teaching introduction to fiction courses, Ann Charters developed an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom. She also discovered that writers, not editors, have the most interesting and useful things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction....

One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach - all the damn vampires....

The Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival returns for 2023 with 135 films selected for screening October 9 through the 15th. SciFi fans from around the world are welcomed to join this one-of-a-kind event as all films will be made available online for streaming and rating through Brooklyn SciFi's Netflix style festival platform. This year...

At dawn he arose and stepped out onto the patio for his first look at Alexandria, the one city he had not yet seen. That year the five cities were Chang-an, Asgard, New Chicago, Timbuctoo, Alexandria: the usual mix of eras, cultures, realities. He and Gioia, making the long flight from Asgard in the distant north the night...

I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?"...

The most fascinating, and daunting, aspect of selecting material for an anthology titled The Year's Best Fantasy is that the field of fantasy is as broad and transmutable as the whole field of literature. In American publishing today we have a genre called Adult Fantasy, which evolved after J. R. R. Tolkien’s books proved so...

The Celtic Wolf is a complex and otherworldly creature. Wolves, it would seem, have always had varied personalities as diverse as their human counterparts. Where one shapeshifting wolf could be seen as evil, for example, the next might very well turn towards a traveling priest and begin to preach the gospel....

This groundbreaking anthology inaugurates an exciting new annual tradition: a giant collection of the finest fantasy stories published in 1987. Culled from the pages of magazines and original anthologies, this year’s collection features brilliant, gripping tales by these stellar authors:...

Boy, was Spielberg ever wrong. Close Encounters my ass....

All we are is dust in the wind, dude....

The Mabinogion (Welsh pronunciation: [mabɪˈnɔɡjɔn] ⓘ) are the earliest Welsh prose stories, and belong to the Matter of Britain. The stories were compiled in Middle Welsh in the 12th–13th centuries from earlier oral traditions. There are two main source manuscripts, created c. 1350–1410, as well as a few earlier...

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to...

Gertrude Stein moved from California to Paris in 1903 with the aspiration of becoming a writer. She is best known for her art collection, plays, and novels, which involve radical experiments in language and the use of “stream-of-consciousness.” Once settled in Paris, she built up an art collection while living with her...

Don't panic, and bring a towel....

Long ago, so the Storyteller claimed, the evil God Torak sought dominion and drove men and Gods to war. But Belgarath the Sorcerer led men to reclaim the Orb that protected men of the West. So long as it lay at Riva, the prophecy went, men would be safe......

Never give up and good luck will find you....

David Day's A TOLKIEN BESTIARY is a scholarly, definitive and enchantingly beautiful explanation of all the imaginary beasts, monsters, races, nations,deities, fauna and flora of J.R.R- Tolkien's fantasy worlds of Middle-earth and the Undying Lands....

Black Orpheus (Portuguese: Orfeu Negro [ɔɾˈfew ˈneɣɾu]) is a 1959 romantic tragedy film directed by French filmmaker Marcel Camus, and starring Marpessa Dawn and Breno Mello. It is based on the play Orfeu da Conceição by Vinicius de Moraes, which set the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in a contemporary favela in...

I am Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan, Ib Al Abbas, Ibn Rasid, Ibn Hammad. And things were not always thus. At one time, I was a poet in the greatest city in the world. Life was easy and I lived without care. Until one fateful day, I met a beautiful woman who belonged to another man....