Skip to main content

Blog Archives

Older posts
Newer posts

Lafcadio Hearn

Born on the Greek island of Lefkada, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was brought up in both Ireland and England. At nineteen he emigrated to the United States where he became a journalist. After a sojourn in the French West Indies, he sailed for Japan in 1890. Hearn wrote extensively about his new homeland, its tales, customs, and religions, acting as a bridge between Japan and the Western world. He died in Tokyo where he is buried under his Japanese name, Koizumi Yakumo.

  • More on Lafcadio Hearn can be found in various issues of The Green Book

Henry C. Mercer

Dreamer, castle builder, archaeologist, and anthropologist, Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930) inherited a fortune that fuelled his wanderlust. Mercer was a tireless creative genius who spent his life fulfilling his family motto, Plus ultra—“More Beyond”. He earned a law degree, mastered five languages, supervised archaeological digs around the world, and became a beloved philanthropist in his ancestral home of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Overshadowed by his many accomplishments is the wonderful but nearly forgotten collection of stories, November Night Tales.

Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber was born in Chicago on 24 December 1910. Although trained as an actor, he made his name among the pages of the pulp magazines of the 1930s and ’40s. After a brief correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, Leiber began writing in earnest, penning classics of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including Conjure Wife, the Hugo Award-winning Ill Met in Lankhmar, and the pioneering tale of urban supernaturalism “Smoke Ghost”. Leiber passed away in San Francisco in 1992 at the age of eighty-one.

George William Russell

George William Russell (1867-1935)—who published as “A.E.”—was a poet, painter, economist, and mystic. In 1897 he started work with Sir Horace Plunkett’s Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, editing their journal The Irish Homestead. In addition to numerous volumes of poetry, essays, and mystical writings, A.E. also nurtured the careers of Ireland’s most important writers, including Patrick Kavanagh, James Stephens, and James Joyce. Highly regarded in life, on his death A.E.’s funeral cortège was over a mile long.

  • More on George William Russell (A.E.) can be found in various issues of The Green Book

Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College. As a young man he worked as a civil servant at Dublin Castle, and as an unpaid theatre critic for local newspapers. He is best remembered today for his classic novel Dracula (1897), but during his lifetime he was known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving, and business manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London. Other notable works include The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm.

  • More on Bram Stoker can be found in various issues of The Green Book

R. B. Russell

R. B. Russell is the author of three novels, three novellas and four short story collections, along with a few books of non-fiction. With his partner, Rosalie Parker, he publishes classic works of curious and macabre fiction under the Tartarus Press imprint.

William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson was born in Blackmore End, Essex on 15 November 1877. Though distinguished as a sailor, body builder, photographer, and soldier, Hodgson is now remembered as a writer of the fantastic and macabre: The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), The Ghost Pirates (1909), The Night Land (1912), and the occult detective stories in Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (1913). Hodgson’s literary career was tragically cut short by an artillery shell at the Battle of Ypres in late April 1918.

Nicholas Royle

Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections—Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy, London Gothic, and Manchester Uncanny—and seven novels, including Counterparts, Antwerp, and First Novel. He has edited more than twenty-five anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories. He runs Nightjar Press, which publishes original short stories as signed, numbered chapbooks. His English translation of Vincent de Swarte’s 1998 novel Pharricide was published by Confingo Publishing in 2019. In 2021 his first book of non-fiction, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collecter, was published by Salt.

Lynda E. Rucker

Lynda E. Rucker has written more than fifty stories for various magazines and anthologies. She contributed a segment to The Ghost Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, an anthology of horror plays produced on London’s West End, won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Story in 2015, and edited Uncertainties III for Swan River Press. Her previous collections include The Moon Will Look Strange and You’ll Know When You Get There.

Rosa Mulholland

Rosa Mulholland was born in Belfast on 19 March 1841. In 1891 she married the eminent Irish historian Sir John T. Gilbert (1829-1898). In addition to her two-volume Life of Sir John T. Gilbert (1905), Mulholland produced a long line of novels mostly set in rural Ireland, and featuring strong female characters, including The Wicked Woods of Tobereevil (1872) and Banshee Castle (1895). Many of her supernatural tales were collected in The Haunted Organist of Hurly Burly (1880). Mulholland died at her home Villa Nova on 21 April 1921.

  • More on Rosa Mulholland can be found in various issues of The Green Book
Older posts
Newer posts