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Loading... The New Uncanny: Tales of Uneaseby Sarah Eyre (Editor), Ra Page (Editor)
   No current Talk conversations about this book. 2   avaland | Feb 25, 2010 | 
 The introduction by Ra Page is an excellent survey of “The Uncanny” in its own right, discussing how Freud provided a “literary template…a shopping list of shivers” that horror writers have managed to return to again and again over the past century. Page explains Freud’s essay in one of the most clear and careful ways I’ve ever seen in print. When discussing the tales in The New Uncanny, Page notes that the majority of the stories feature either the double or the doll most often, and turns to another essay on the Uncanny — Rilke’s “Dolls: On the Waxwork Dolls of Lotte Pritzel” (1913) — to discover convincing reasons why. I love the way Page concludes the introduction: “[The Uncanny] puts us on edge — that place we really should be from time to time — and reminds us: it’s us that’s alive.” - Michael Arnzen Awards
Performing a deft metaphorical evisceration of Sigmund Freud's classic 1919 essay that delved deeply into the tradition of horror writing, this freshly contemporary collection of literary interpretations reintroduces to the world Freud's compelling theory of das unheimliche--or, the uncanny. Specifically designed to challenge the creative boundaries of some of the most famed and respected horror writers working today--such as A. S. Byatt, Christopher Priest, Hanif Kureishi, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Matthew Holness, and the indomitable Ramsey Campbell--this anatomically precise experiment encapsulates what the uncanny represents in the 21st century. Masterfully narrated with the benefit of unique perspectives on what exactly it is that goes bump in the night, this chilling modern collective is not only an essential read for fans of horror but also an insightful and intriguing introduction to the greats of the genre at their gruesome best. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.08738080914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Horror and ghost fiction Horror fiction Subdivisions Collections of literary texts in more than one formLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.25)
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Wikipedia in English
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If interested, you can read Freud's essay here
This anthology won the Shirley Jackson Award last year. I recognized about half of the authors in this anthology and of those, I had read other work by them. These stories are not ones of overt horror stories, but are meant to give one some unease or "the creeps". While I certainly enjoyed some of them, others were kind of meh.
Favorites were: A. S. Byatt's "Doll's Eyes" a delightfully subtle, creepy tale about what happens when a woman gives her lover one of her precious dolls from her collection only to see it turn up on Antiques Roadshow. Jane Rogers' "Ped-o-matic" tells the story of one young mother who is leaving her infant for the first time to return to work. On a business trip to Paris she stops in the airport for a foot massage...but the machine won't let go of her feet when she needs to leave.
Etgar Keret's "Anette and I are Fucking in Hell" - which is not much more than a page long - is a creepily funny sex scene in hell. And In Christopher Priest's "The Sorting Out," a young widow and ardent bibliophile, who is in the process of ending a relationship, returns to her home to discover it has been broken into. The story is suspenseful as she must go through each of the rooms of the house oen by one, but interestingly, the only things out of place are a few books here and there --- the authors' names all begin with "D". What does it mean?
It seems to me that I responded best the stories where the creepy element is sort of a manifestation of or connected somehow to the character's internal conflicts. There were other stories that were interesting and imaginative but didn't seem to make an emotional connection. Still, this is a worthy collection to explore if one is interested in the elements of unease in fiction (fiction like other 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Winners like [Disquiet] by Julia Leigh and [The Diving Pool] by Yoko Ogawa) (