In the winter of 1922, Kafka famously suffered “something very much like a breakdown,” which he described as “an assault on the last earthly frontier.”1 Two clocks had fallen out of sync. One limpe...

“There’s places in there nobody won’t never see into.” — The Wendigo1 In his youth, Algernon Blackwood, son of a wealthy English family, was shipped off to Canada from London for some practica...

“Ignorance is the mother of all evil.” ― François Rabelais, Book IV Giants of “Par Ris” Before François Rabelais (c. 1494-1553) immortalized Gargantua in “La vie très horrifique du grand Garg...

In Aelian’s ‘Varia Historia’ (235 CE), when Perictione laid her infant Plato in the shade of a myrtle tree so that she could perform divine rites, “a swarm of Hymettian bees settled on his lips as ...

“Halfway through the story of my life I came to in a gloomy wood, because I’d wandered off the path…” — The Inferno of Dante Aligheri (trans Carson) I first encountered Irish poet Ciaran Ca...

“To see is to think, and to think is to see.” —Richard Serra Hidden in a muddy field surrounded by woods and wet bog on the periphery of King City, Ontario, lie six concrete walls shifting acr...

This is Kionywarihwaen, which means “where we have a story to tell” in the Wendat language, also known as Crawford Lake. Chosen for its exceptional characteristics as a possible “golden spike” —pro...

Lunar Trilogy “We escaped from Earth, but Death, that powerful queen of earth tribes traveled through space with us.” — Jerzy Żuławski, The Lunar Trilogy Deserts often function as a speculati...

Peter Schumann’s family fled their home in Silesia, Germany during allied bombings in World War II. Living in a refugee camp, they survived on turnips and his mother’s sourdough rye bread. It was a...

There are varying accounts of the death of Empedocles, philosopher of Love and Strife, from Laërtius to Hölderlin. Some say he threw himself into the flames of Mount Etna to prove to his disciples ...