The Dedalus Occult Reader: The Garden of Hermetic Dreams

by Gary Lachman

Overview

Lachman presents a generous anthology of literary texts inspired by the weird, the supernatural and the gothic. From Beckford's Vathek to Gustav Meyrink's The Golem, there is a successful balance of the well-known, the esoteric and the curious.' Stuart Kelly in Scotland on Sunday 'The first item, from William Beckford's Vathek, indicates the feverish imaginings gathered in this "occult reader". It encompasses drugs, sacrifice, a genii and an Indian who becomes irresistibly arousing by transforming himself into a ball. ETA Hoffman's The Golden Flower Pot shows how this writer's fertile imagination can animate even everyday objects, as in his best-known work, The Nutcracker. But the oddest example is the most recent. From 1999, Robert Irwin's explicit account of cult sexual initiation somehow involves "The Gambols" cartoon strip from the Daily Express.' Chris Hirst in The Independent 'Lachman has found in these stories such a strong linking thread that not only will you marvel that precisely the same interest in the world of hidden forms...has animated so many authors, you may even begin to think there's something in it...There is a time and a place for these stories: it is now.' Nick Lezard's Choice in The Guardian for paperback of the week '...fascinatingly offbeat stuff from Balzac, H. G. Wells, the endearingly sloppy Robert Irwin, Huysmans, and the enchantingly lurid Pole Jan Potocki.' Chris Power in The Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909232204
Publisher:	SCB Distributors
Publication date:	05/13/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	663 KB

About the Author

Gary Lachman is the author of the Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind, an 'occult history' of the 1960s, The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse, The Dedalus Occult Reader, The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead Letters and In Search of P.D.Ouspensky:The Genius in the Shadow of Gurdjieff and , as Gary Valentine, New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation with Blondie, Iggy Pop and Others 1974-1981, a memoir of his years as a musician in New York in the 1970s.

A founding member of the rock group Blondie, he wrote some of the band's early hits. Before moving to London in 1996 and becoming a full time writer, Gary studied philosophy, taught English literature, was Science Writer for a major American university, and managed a metaphysical bookstore. He is a regular contributor to Fortean Times, and has written for TLS, Guardian, Independent on Sunday, Mojo, Bizarre, and other journals in the US and UK.