/lit/ - Literature

>>14812313
Weird fiction is best fiction.

>>13612467
I just looked at that edition's contents. If you're on pg. 140 and really still hate it, give it up. You don't like Lovecraft. Try Machen or Blackwood.

>>11991823
Seconded.

>>11220718
Some of them, yes. Most of them are as they appeared originally in Weird Tales (which of course involved editing), or are posthumous edits from his archives. The Lovecraft ones are similar. These aren't definitive versions, but they're generally the ones that made the authors popular in the first place.

>>11089372
Do you like old weird fiction?

Sure.

>>10578940
Genre reading is just part of life. I read everything, and have an extensive library of literature and classics, but I was once a little kid blown away by Tolkien, and I don't see any reason to leave that behind--especially since I teach several different genre fiction courses at the local universities (Fantasy, SF, Mystery, Children's Lit, Horror).

It's a good collection: all the published works as they appeared in Weird Tales, and a long bio-essay at the back. I'm sorry Gollancz abandoned their "big black books" at 6.

>>9245446
But Chambers, aside from a few stories, is boring as hell. Blackwood and Machen have lots of great weird fiction, but not Chambers.

Go for the classics first.

I've always found weird fiction very comfy, though the quality is wildly variable. It's nice evocative stuff that enjoys playing with language and fear.

>>8760040
They're not the absolute best in terms of textual revision from manuscripts, and they don't have unpublished works. What Golancz does have (this is true for the Lovecraft and Howard books) are the stories published in Weird Tales as originally published--so you get the archive of the stories as they influenced others through the pulps. Also, some decent essay afterword material. They're my favorite reading copies (the hardcovers only: the paperback versions of the big black books turn into used phone-book warped junk quickly).

The Gollancz "black books" back there. Weird fiction and pulp adventure overlap: Howard, Burroughs, Leiber, etc.

I smiled.

>>8472103
That edition has the first six Tarzan novels, and the they can be fun, but after #2 you realize the insane deus ex machina involved is just surreal. Every ship going anywhere near Africa goes down and every lost or marooned person ends up finding the Graystoke treehouse. You'd think the entire Atlantic coast of the continent was about 3 miles long. Burroughs is fun pulp, but he's a century old, so John Carter, Tarzan, Carson of Venus, Pellucidar, etc., has every cliche known to mankind in their stories, because he invented half of them. Still, it's like reading Conan: half the fun is seeing the alpha males deal with problems in awesome fashion.

My fave weird fiction.

Enjoy.

Both formats have their advantages, obviously, but OP just asked which we prefer and why, not which must dominate the earth and which must be destroyed.

I prefer the weird fiction: less pretentious, more pulpy, but sometimes excellent: Blackwood and Machen especially.

>>6950971
Blackwood and Machen kick ass.