By: Joshua Glenn

“The planet has a fever,” Al Gore told Republican skeptics in Congress on March 21. “If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says, ‘You have to intervene here,’ […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Mechanical humanoids who continue to haunt today’s sf.

By: Joshua Glenn

The influence of Radium-Age supermen remains a powerful one.

By: Sarah Weinman

If you know CORNELL WOOLRICH’s (1903-68) oeuvre at all, it’s most likely through the films of the standout directors who’ve interpreted it: Hitchcock’s Rear Window, for example, was based on Woolrich’s story “It Had to […]

By: James Parker

I had just removed his hand — gently, I hope — from my knee when the man in the off-white linen suit told me that he was the one who recruited Bob Dylan into the […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Perhaps the most prolific cartoonist ever for the high-middlebrow/nobrow New Yorker, and creator of the story that inspired the quatsch film Shrek, WILLIAM STEIG (1907-2003) might not seem an obvious hero for HiLobrow.com. Ladies and […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Her Earthsea fantasy novels — most signally, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972) — concern the education of a young wizard, and are recommended for those who […]

By: Tom Nealon

It is as impossible to think of the 20th century absent Cosimo from The Baron in the Trees (1957), by ITALO CALVINO (1923-1985), as it is to think of the 19th without Raskolnikov, the 18th […]

By: Lucy Sante

JIM THOMPSON (1906-77) was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in a room above the jail, the son of a crooked sheriff. A good part of his destiny was cemented then and there. Early on he became […]

By: Sarah Weinman

One of my favorite children’s books, the madcap Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back (1963), by SHEL SILVERSTEIN (1930-99), is about loneliness, friendship, and the perils of too much success — all of which turn […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The popularity of apocalyptic fiction in the Sixties (1964-73), it has been suggested, indicates that SF writers had become bored and suspicious of utopian idylls promising that ameliorative reforms could right modern civilization’s manifold wrongs; […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Skrulls hiding in great works of literature

By: Tor Aarestad

We’re riding a swell of black-humored children’s literature, these days — the Lemony Snicket books are just a whitecap. However, as dark as these contemporary tales may be, none is so misanthropic as those of […]

By: Tom Nealon

Were his novels written by half-crazed, single-minded machines?

By: Sarah Weinman

The precise definition of “New Weird” (a recent avant-garde literary movement seeking to update a moribund Fantasy/SF genre) remains elusive, but the works of British author CHINA MIÉVILLE (born 1972) simultaneously fit and subvert the […]