The White People and Other Weird Stories

The White People and Other Weird Stories - Paperback

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The White People and Other Weird Stories
  • The White People and Other Weird Stories
The White People and Other Weird Stories - Paperback

The White People and Other Weird Stories - Paperback

by Arthur Machen
$18.00
$18.00

Book Overview

by Arthur Machen (Author), S. T. Joshi (Introduction by), S. T. Joshi (Notes by)

Classic tales of the fantastic, creepy and weird, with a foreword from the award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo Del Toro

Machen's weird tales of the creepy and fantastic finally come to Penguin Classics. With an introduction from S.T. Joshi, editor of American Supernatural Tales, The White People and Other Weird Stories is the perfect introduction to the father of weird fiction. The title story "The White People" is an exercise in the bizarre leaving the reader disoriented and on edge. From the first page, Machen turns even fundamental truths upside-down, as his character Ambrose explains, "there have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin, who all their lives have never done an 'ill deed'" setting the stage for a tale entirely without logic.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Author Biography

Arthur Machen (Arthur Llewelyn Jones), a Welsh author of supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction, was born on March 3, 1863. He grew up in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, and attended boarding school at Hereford Cathedral School. He moved to London in 1881 and worked as a journalist, children's tutor, and publisher's clerk, finding time to write at night. By 1894, Machen had his first major success. The Great God Pan was published by John Lane, and despite widespread criticism for its sexual and horrific content, it sold well and went into a second edition. In the 1920s Machen's work became immensely popular in the United States, but Machen experienced increasing poverty; he was saved in 1931 by receiving a Civil List pension from the British government. Arthur Machen died on March 30, 1947.

S. T. Joshi (b. 1958) is the author of such critical studies as The Modern Weird Tale (2001). His exhaustive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), won the British Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association.

Guillermo del Toro (b. 1964) is a Mexican director, producer, screenwriter, novelist and designer. He is most recognized for his Academy Award-winning films, Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy film franchise. He is an avid fan of weird fiction and fantasy writing and the genres heavily inspire his movies.
Number of Pages: 416
Dimensions: 0.8 x 7.7 x 5 IN
Publication Date: September 27, 2011
ISBN9780143105596
Author Arthur Machen
PublisherPenguin Classics
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedSeptember 2011
LanguageENG- English
Pages416
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Classics Fiction Horror Short Stories

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About Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen is a significant figure in supernatural literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His work, which mixes Gothic horror with fin-de-siecle mysticism, has influenced writers and film-makers (notably H. P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen King, and Alan Moore). From the beginning of his literary career, Machen espoused a mystical belief that the humdrum ordinary world hid a more mysterious and strange world beyond. His gothic and decadent works of the 1890s concluded that the lifting of this veil could lead to madness, sex, or death, and usually a combination of all three. Machen's later works became somewhat less obviously full of gothic trappings, but for him investigations into mysteries invariably resulted in life-changing transformation and sacrifice. Aaron Worth is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Boston University, having previously taught courses in English and American literature at Brandeis University. His book Imperial Media: Colonial and Information Systems in the British Literary Imagination, 1857-1918 was published by Ohio State UP in 2014 (reviewed in TLS and widely in scholarly journals; paperback edition in 2016). He has published essays on Victorian literature and culture in leading journals including Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Poetry, as well as original horror fiction in magazines including Cemetery Dance and Aliterate. Worth is the author of the entry on Horror Fiction in the recent Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (2015).

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