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News Roundup 4
22 August 2020
Cover of Penguin SF Classics edition of A Voyage to Arcturus

Some more Lindsay-related news:

• The cover for the Penguin Classics Science Fiction edition of A Voyage to Arcturus has been revealed. The illustration is by Belorussian artist Beniamin Basov (1913–2000), and is taken from his illustrations originally created for Dostoevsky's novella White Nights. The book is due to be released on 28th January 2021. You can read more about it at Penguin's site. (One interesting thing to note is that a lot of the books in the series have audiobook versions. Perhaps this will happen for Arcturus, too?)

• The August 2020 edition of The Roots International Journal of Multidisciplinary Researches, (PDF here) contains an essay, "Surrealistic Advent in A Voyage To Arcturus", by J Sundhar Singh, E Alice Renola, and Dr L Mercylatha. Although it is a peer-reviewed journal, I do feel the article could have done with the attentions of an editor, as it often reads like a clash between overly-academic writing and automated translation ("In recapitulation, it is to be admitted that the ingenuity is that capacity to clench reciprocally distinctive veracities and enticement a spark from their coincidence."). (And I would suggest it was an attempt to introduce surrealism into the article itself, but other pieces in the journal read the same way.) Still, it's nice to see Arcturus being addressed by academics outside the English-speaking world (the Roots Journal is published in Madurai, India).

Cover of Bookship's Four Novels

• I've released, through my Bookship imprint, an anthology edition of the four main novels David Lindsay published in his lifetime, A Voyage to Arcturus, The Haunted Woman, Sphinx, and Devil's Tor. It's currently for Kindle only, and I have no plans to produce it as a physical book (which would be well over 1,000 pages). You can get it from your country's Amazon, including Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

• Not a new item, but a recent discovery: on YouTube is a recording of Steven Sutcliffe's 2016 talk as part of the The Occult in Popular Fiction and Entertainments conference at University College Dublin, "Dreams, Spirits and Witches in the strange interwar fiction of David Lindsay". The audio isn't great, but it's an interesting listen. Listen to it here on YouTube. There's also a related interview with Sutcliffe.

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