I love — with the power of a thousand burning suns — the fact that Amy Richau ends her beautiful Star Wars book I LOVE YOU. I KNOW. with Baze and Chirrut.
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On this day in 1916, the great Shirley Jackson was born.
Here’s a little piece I wrote earlier this year about teaching Jackson’s remarkable novel Hangsaman. It’s posted at “Reading Shirley Jackson in the 21st Century,” an online resource investigating the past and future landscapes of Shirley Jackson studies.
I’m looking forward to teaching The Haunting of Hill House in January!
Teaching Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951) by Amy H. Sturgis
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I’ll be starting 2024 with two visits to Hill House! I’m joining SPACE (Signum Portals for Adult Continuing Education) online with Signum University. My first modules include The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (January) and its authorized sequel, A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand (February).
Registration is now open for January’s module. Voting is now open for February’s module. Here are more details. I hope to see you in SPACE!
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It was a joy to narrate the powerful “More Real Than Real” by Greta Hayer for the Cast of Wonders podcast.
Cast of Wonders 537: More Real Than Real | Cast of Wonders
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I had a fantastic time talking with brilliant hosts Ashley Thomas and Mike Slamer of the WE ARE STARFLEET podcast about the new anthology STAR TREK: ESSAYS EXPLORING THE FINAL FRONTIER, which I co-edited with Emily Strand. Thanks so much for a wonderful chat! ?
Listen to the episode here.
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October is almost here!
I’m currently working on new academic projects related to Dark Academia (the subgenre, not the aesthetic), so for Halloween month I’ll be posting a different DA title each day with a haunting/atmospheric quote. I hope you’ll enjoy the recs!
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October 1: Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson (1951)
Quote:
Poor things, she thought - do they have to spend all this energy just to surround me? It seemed pitiful that these automatons should be created and wasted, never knowing more than a minor fragment of the pattern in which they were involved, to learn and follow through insensitively a tiny step in the great dance which was seen close up as the destruction of Natalie, and far off, as the end of the world.
They had all earned their deaths, Natalie thought…
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October 2: Conversion by Katherine Howe (2014)
Quote:
Something was eating away at the back of my brain. Girls. Dominant narratives. Sex. Death. Arthur Miller. Ann Putman sitting invisible right in the middle of history.
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October 3: Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé (2021).
Quote:
I feel like I’m reliving the same nightmare over and over, and it will never stop.
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31 Days of Dark Academia: Halloween 2021
October 4: Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (1967)
Quote:
The girl so far had remembered nothing of her experiences on the Rock; nor, in Doctor McKenzie’s opinion or that of the two eminent specialists from Sydney and Melbourne, would she ever remember. A portion of the delicate mechanism of the brain appeared to be irrevocably damaged.
“Like a clock, you know,” the doctor explained. “A clock that stops under a certain set of unusual conditions and refuses ever to go again beyond a particular point.”
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October 5: Grey Land Duology by Peadar Ó Guilín (2016-2018)
Quote from The Call (2016):
“Oh, they mean to do more than kill you, child. They want to twist you. To crumple you up like an old sheet of paper.”
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October 6: The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)
Quote:
Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does.
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OCT. 7: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (2019)
Quote 1:
I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.
Quote 2:
All you children playing with fire, looking surprised when the house burns down.
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October 8: Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber (1943)
Quote:
Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse.
Film Adaptations: Weird Woman (1944), Night of the Eagle (A.K.A. Burn, Witch, Burn!) (1962), and Witches’ Brew (A.K.A. Which Witch is Which?) (1980)
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October 9: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss (2018)
Quote:
Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.
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October 10: This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers (2012)
Quote 1:
We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the soundtrack of our own impending death.
Quote 2:
Sometimes you catch something specific like the screams and cries of people trying to hold on to each other before they’re swallowed into other, bigger noises. This is what it sounds like when the world ends.
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October 11: Legendborn by Tracy Deonn (2020)
Quote:
That memorial over at the Arboretum is the pretty acknowledgement, the polite one. But the blood? The blood’s buried here.
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October 13: Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas (2020)
Quote:
You are here. You are in. And doesn’t it feel good? You are in the house and the house is in the woods. You are in the house and the house is in you.
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My latest “Looking Back on Genre History segment is up on the newest episode of the StarShipSofa podcast, and it focuses on Dark Academia!
You can hear it here.
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