Halloween Staff Picks for Scary Times, 2020

On New Year’s Day 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was first published in an anonymous three-volume edition of 500 copies. Some thought the book was too radical in its implications; a few found the central theme intriguing; no-one predicted its success.

Since then, there have been many, many adaptations—120 films alone, at the last count—on screen, stage, in novels, comics and graphic novels, in advertisements and even on cereal packets. From a Regency nightmare, Frankenstein became a cuddly childhood companion—thoroughly munstered, so to speak. The story has been interpreted as a feminist allegory of birthing, an ecological reading of mother earth, an attack on masculinist science, the origin of science fiction, an example of “female gothic,” a reaction to the rise of the industrial proletariat and much else besides. Frankenstein lives! The F word has been applied, since the 1950s, to test-tube babies, heart transplants, prosthetics, robotics, cosmetic surgery, genetic engineering, genetically modified crops and numerous other public anxieties arising from scientific research. Today, Frankenstein has taken over from Adam and Eve as the creation myth for the age of genetic engineering.

This book, celebrating the 200th birthday of Frankenstein, traces the journey of Shelley’s Frankenstein from limited-edition literature into the bloodstream of contemporary culture. With text by renowned Gothic scholar Sir Christopher Frayling, it includes new research on the novel’s origins; a facsimile reprint of the earliest-known manuscript version of the creation scene; visual material on adaptations for the stage, in magazines, on playbills, in prints and in book publications of the 19th century; visual essays on many of the film versions and their inspirations in the history of art; and Frankenstein in popular culture—on posters, advertisements, packaging, in comics and graphic novels.

Goya: Order & Disorder

Published by MFA Publications.
Text by Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Frederick Ilchman, Janis A. Tomlinson, Clifford S. Ackley, Jane E. Braun, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Gudrun Maurer, Elisabetta Polidori, Sue W. Reed, Benjamin Weiss, Juliet Wilson-Bareau.

Francisco Goya has been widely celebrated as the most important Spanish artist of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the last of the old masters and the first of the moderns, and an astute observer of the human condition in all its complexity. The many-layered and shifting meanings of his work have made him one of the most studied artists in the world. Few, however, have made the ambitious attempt to explore his work as a painter, printmaker and draftsman across media and the timeline of his life. This book does just that, presenting a comprehensive and integrated view of Goya's most important paintings, prints, and drawings through the themes and imagery that continually challenged or preoccupied the artist. They reveal how he strove relentlessly to understand and describe human behavior and emotional states, even at their most orderly or disorderly extremes, in elegant and incisive portraits, dramatic and monumental history paintings, and series of prints and drawings of a satirical, disturbing and surreal nature. Derived from the research for the largest Goya art exhibition in North America in a quarter-century, this book takes a fresh look at one of the greatest artists in history by examining the fertile territory between the two poles that defined the range of his boundlessly creative personality.

Francisco José Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) was born in Fuendetodos, Aragón, in the northeast of Spain. Goya was court painter to the Spanish Crown, and famously documented the Peninsular War (1807–1814) between France and Spain in his harrowing Disasters of War series. An important bridge to the modernist era, Goya's oeuvre provided a crucial precedent for artists such as Manet, Picasso and Francis Bacon.

Spells

Published by Wakefield Press.
By Michel de Ghelderode. Introduction and translation by George MacLennan.

Hitherto unavailable in English, Spells, by the Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode, ranks among the 20th century’s most noteworthy collections of fantastic tales. Like Ghelderode’s plays, the stories are marked by a powerful imagination and a keen sense of the grotesque, but in these the author speaks to us still more directly. Written at a time of illness and isolation, and conceived as a fresh start, Spells was Ghelderode’s last major creative work, and he claimed it as his most personal and deeply felt one: a set of written spells through which his fears, paranoia and nostalgia found concrete form.

By turns mystical, macabre and whimsically humorous, and set in the unsettled atmosphere of Brussels, Ostend, Bruges and London, Spells conjures up an uncanny realm of angels, demons, masks, effigies and apparitions, a twilit, oppressed world of diseased gardens, dusty wax mannequins and sinister relics.

Combining the full contents of both the 1941 and 1947 editions, this translation of Spells is the most comprehensive edition yet published.

Michel de Ghelderode was born in Brussels in 1898. After nearly a decade of penning fiction, drama, literary journalism and puppet plays, in 1926 he began to write almost entirely for the theater and the following ten years saw the creation of most of his major plays. After 1936 he suffered from poor health and his involvement with the theater diminished. In the later 1940s, performances of his plays in Paris sparked a major awakening of interest in his work. Ghelderode died in 1962; the interior of his apartment, packed with books, pictures, puppets and masks, has been reassembled in Brussels as the Musée-Bibliothèque Michel de Ghelderode.

AVERY LOZADO | DATE 10/1/2020

Published by Reel Art Press.By Christopher Frayling.

PUBLISHER Reel Art Press

21 Years in Hell

Published by Reel Art Press.Text by Marilyn Manson, Perou.

Marilyn Manson behind the scenes and onstage, in classic and previously unpublished images by his foremost portraitist

PUBLISHER Reel Art Press

As Portrayed by Walter Fischer

Published by Trapart Books.Foreword by Carl Abrahamsson, Alf Wahlgren. Introduction by Kenneth Anger.

Satanism and the silver screen: the bizarre friendship of Anton LaVey and Jayne Mansfield

PUBLISHER Trapart Books

Published by Radius Books/D.A.P..Text by Sergio Rodríguez Blanco, George Otis.

The acclaimed photographer of African masks turns her lens to the astounding mask cultures of Mexico

PUBLISHER Radius Books/D.A.P.

Published by MFA Publications.Text by Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Frederick Ilchman, Janis A. Tomlinson, Clifford S. Ackley, Jane E. Braun, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Gudrun Maurer, Elisabetta Polidori, Sue W. Reed, Benjamin Weiss, Juliet Wilson-Bareau.

PUBLISHER MFA Publications

A Most Rare Compendium of the Whole Magical Art

Published by Fulgur Press.Edited and translated by Hereward Tilton, Merlin Cox. Introduction by Hereward Tilton.

A full-color facsimile of an 18th-century black-magic compendium

PUBLISHER Fulgur Press

Deception, Magic and the Paranormal

Published by D.A.P..By Matthew L. Tompkins.

The tricks and props of magic and spiritualism: how magicians and psychics fooled the world—and what scientists can learn from them

PUBLISHER D.A.P.

Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration

Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.By Richard Barnett.

Bizarre and captivating images, including close-up details and revealing cross-sections, make all too clear the fascinations of both doctors and artists of the time

PUBLISHER D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic

Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.By Joanna Ebenstein.

"Ebenstein, founder of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, finds her peculiar subject at the intersection of science and art in 18th-century Florence." –Publishers Weekly

PUBLISHER D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

Published by Wakefield Press.By Michel de Ghelderode. Introduction and translation by George MacLennan.

PUBLISHER Wakefield Press

Published by Reel Art Press.
By Christopher Frayling.

PUBLISHER
Reel Art Press

Published by Reel Art Press.
Text by Marilyn Manson, Perou.

PUBLISHER
Reel Art Press

Published by Trapart Books.
Foreword by Carl Abrahamsson, Alf Wahlgren. Introduction by Kenneth Anger.

PUBLISHER
Trapart Books

Published by Radius Books/D.A.P..
Text by Sergio Rodríguez Blanco, George Otis.

PUBLISHER
Radius Books/D.A.P.

Published by MFA Publications.
Text by Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Frederick Ilchman, Janis A. Tomlinson, Clifford S. Ackley, Jane E. Braun, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Gudrun Maurer, Elisabetta Polidori, Sue W. Reed, Benjamin Weiss, Juliet Wilson-Bareau.

PUBLISHER
MFA Publications

Published by Fulgur Press.
Edited and translated by Hereward Tilton, Merlin Cox. Introduction by Hereward Tilton.

PUBLISHER
Fulgur Press

Published by D.A.P..
By Matthew L. Tompkins.

PUBLISHER
D.A.P.

Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.
By Richard Barnett.

PUBLISHER
D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.
By Joanna Ebenstein.

PUBLISHER
D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

Published by Wakefield Press.
By Michel de Ghelderode. Introduction and translation by George MacLennan.

PUBLISHER
Wakefield Press