Lewis's "On Stories" began life as a lecture, "The Kappa Element in Romance", first presented in 1940. Asking what makes pure story compelling, Lewis rejects the idea it's merely because of exciting or suspenseful events, and says that the events of the best stories form a sort of poetry that can be enjoyed even on a second, third or fourth reading, when the elements of surprise and suspense must surely be lost. He calls A Voyage to Arcturus, "perhaps the most remarkable achievement in this kind" (p. 11). The essay was first published in 1947. This collection contains a few other essays and lectures featuring brief mentions of David Lindsay, including "On Science Fiction" (from a talk given in 1955), and "Unreal Estates" (the transcript of a conversation between Lewis, Brian Aldiss and Kinglsey Amis, recorded in 1962).

Collects essays by the three authors.

J B Pick contributes the real meat of the book with the all-too brief (at 30 pages) "A sketch of Lindsay's life as man and writer", and detailed summaries of Lindsay's then-unpublished works, "The unpublished novels: The Violet Apple and The Witch".

Colin Wilson's "Lindsay as novelist and mystic" gets its first airing, being known in later publications as "The Haunted Man".

E H Visiak contributes a series of short articles: "Discovering a genius" (about Visiak's first reading of Lindsay), "Lindsay as I knew him", "The Haunted Woman", "Arcturus and the Christian dogma", "The nature of Lindsay's genius", and "Devil's Tor".

A slightly expanded version of Wilson's essay from The Strange Genius of David Lindsay, coming in at 63 pages.

Recently reissued in paperback, this is the single longest study of David Lindsay out there at the moment, as well as providing the most extensive biography. See the Cambridge University Press website for information and a downloadable extract.

After 50 pages or so of biography, Sellin carries out a systematic analysis of the themes in those of Lindsay's works available at the time (The Witch and The Violet Apple are covered separately in a final chapter, as their manuscripts were in the US in the process of being published while Sellin was researching his thesis). His initial sections, "Background, settings and places" and "The human world", prove to be the most interesting, as they cover ground not usually examined by critics of Lindsay's work, who are naturally more drawn to the fantastic elements. Sellin comes up with some interesting points, such as the frequent presence of the theatre (in characters' professions, including actor and playwright) and the theatrical (the séance in Arcturus, the masque in Sphinx) in Lindsay's work. The later chapters, on "The world of Crystalman" and "The Sublime world", going over already well-trodden ground as they do, provide interesting moments, but seem more like a series of separate comments than forming an overall view of Lindsay's work. Sellin has a rather dry, often repetitive style, and a tendency to extrapolate beyond the strict bounds of his material: he psychoanalyses Lindsay's relations with women too freely, considering how little is really known of his inner life, and in a reductive Freudian manner that was surely dated even in the period when Sellin was writing; he also embellishes on Lindsay's ideas beyond Lindsay's own words, without making it explicitly clear where he leaves the source material and begins forming his own conclusions. Nevertheless, it's a valuable book, and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in David Lindsay.

Sellin has written other articles on Lindsay (in French), as can be seen from this entry on the University of Brest's website.

Gary K Wolfe's reader's guide to David Lindsay includes a brief biography, a look at the influence of George MacDonald on A Voyage to Arcturus, a detailed look at Arcturus' themes, plot and interpretation, plus shorter chapters devoted to The Haunted Woman and Devil's Tor, then a quick look at Lindsay's other works. At just over 60 pages, an excellent short critical guide, though unfortunately it has a number of small factual errors and confusions, such as getting Lindsay's birhtdate wrong by two years, and saying that he was born both in London and Scotland.

This book mostly deals with noted literary critic Harold Bloom's theory of "revisionism", which views the work of poets and authors as being inspired by a "misreading" of their precursors. He calls one quite separable chapter "Clinamen: Towards a Theory of Fantasy" (which was in fact published separately in the critical anthology Bridges to Fantasy, (1982), edited by George E Slusser, Eric S Rabkin & Robert Scholes), which explores a way of understanding literary fantasy, with particular focus on A Voyage to Arcturus, which Bloom says he has read "literally hundreds of times, indeed obsessively I had read several copies of it to shreds" (p. 213). Passing (and quite deprecating) mention is made of Bloom's single attempt at a novel, The Flight to Lucifer (1979), which was directly inspired by Lindsay's most famous work.

Bloom has developed something of a reputation as a popular literary critic, championing old-fashioned values of reading for enjoyment and the "strangeness" of classic works, as opposed to reading with regard to fashionable political and social values. In his The Western Canon (1995), a defence of the great works of Western Literature (and of the very idea of an accepted canon of such works), Bloom lists A Voyage to Arcturus as part of his prediction for the canon of the modern ("Chaotic") age.

From the publishers of the reissue of Lindsay's Sphinx (and from the same year), Cawthorne and Moorcock's list of the 100 best fantasy novels includes both A Voyage to Arcturus and The Haunted Woman.

Of the poor sales of Lindsay's first novel, it says: "If Hillary, after climbing Everest, had returned to find that everyone had been looking the other way at the time, he might have felt as David Lindsay did after A Voyage to Arcturus was published." (p. 75)

Originally published (and still available from) Paupers Press. Now available as an eBook from Diesel eBooks.

Subtitled "Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction", Pick devotes two chapters to Lindsay. Other authors covered include James Hogg (author of The Confessions of a Justified Sinner), George MacDonald, J M Barrie, John Buchan, Edwin Muir and James Gunn.

Contains a wonderfully incantatory essay by Alan Moore, "Prism and Pentecost: David Lindsay and the British Apocalypse", as well as a reprint of Colin Wilson's "Haunted Man" essay.