In Clowns in the Burying Ground, Christopher K. Coffman presents intertextual readings of the Grateful Dead and their lyrics to argue that the band’s lyricists were deeply and significantly engaged with the literary tradition. Through an analysis of their music, lyrics, and biographies, Coffman shows how the group and its individual members drew on the canons of European and American literature to shape both the form and content of their creative work. Coffman draws on the languag...

Recent poems and fictions set in the early Americas are typically read as affirmations of cultural norms, as evidence of the impossibility of genuine engagement with the historical past, or as contentious repudiations of received histories. Inspired particularly by Mihai Spariosu’s arguments regarding literary playfulness as an opening to peace, Rewriting Early America: The Prenational Past in Postmodern Literature adopts a different perspective, with the goal of demonstrating that many re...

Thomas Pynchon's longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse and energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades—from the 1893 World's Fair to the years just after World War I—and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. The book’s eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, address a significa...

Explore the creative ways music educators across the country are approaching emerging practices in music teaching and learning. Outlined in twenty-five unique case studies, each program offers a new perspective on music teaching and learning, often falling outside the standard music education curriculum. Find innovative ideas and models of successful practice to incorporate into your teaching, whether in school, university, or community settings. Close the gap between music inside and outs...

"This fascinating, massive, wide-ranging collection that editors Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes have gathered together into William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion will soon be recognized as one of those rare critical books for which that egregiously overused term 'groundbreaking' is fully justified." —Larry McCaffery, from the preface of William T. Vollmann: A Critical CompanionThe essays in this collection make a case for regarding William T. Vollmann as the most ambit...

Warning: Haunted Book.Contained within are over 50 stories, or traps, for as many different ghosts. Most of them are not very friendly.A distinct possibility exists that one or more of these traps could fail, granted the reader (redacted).Weird Fiction Quarterly is not responsible if any number of these spirits happen to break out of the page and follow the reader home.You have, after all, been warned.Read at your o...

Weird Fiction Quarterly does Folk Horror!Once again we bring you the finest in our now-signature 500 word flash fiction and exquisite poetry contributions, featuring over 60 writers from all around the globe and a dubious burlap sackful of color illustrations by our own Sarah Walker!Visit a strange, quaint village where the yearly festival is Everything.Call on the cunning woman or the witch doctor for a cure that might cost your very soul....

The works of Poe were dark and often disturbing. From dismembered corpses, rivals bricked behind cellar walls, murders in back alleys, laments for lost loves, obsessions that drive men - and women! - to madness, his stories have had a profound impact on both the horror and mystery genres to this day.In Quoth the Raven, we invite you to answer the call of the raven and revisit Poe's work, re-imagined for the twenty-first century. Here, the lover of mystery and Gothic horror will fin...

Several of American literature’s most prominent authors, and many of their most perceptive critics and reviewers, argue that fiction of the last quarter century has turned away from the tendencies of postmodernist writing. Yet, the nature of that turn, and the defining qualities of American fiction after postmodernism, remain less than clear.This volume identifies four prominent trends of the contemporary scene: the recovery of the real, a rethinking of historical engagement, a pre...