A few last books of 2015

I'd just like to add a few recommendations for two nonfiction titles from 2015, and one translation.

It was very gratifying to see Harold Billings's third volume of his M.P. Shiel biography come out, An Ossuary for M.P. Shiel (Bucharest: L'Homme Recent, 2015). It slimmer than one could have hoped for, and limited to only 85 copies, but it covers the most important aspects of Shiels last years, and serves as an epilogue to Billings's two much more substantial volumes on Shiel's life. And it commemorates the 150th anniversary of Shiel's birth. 

The table of contents

Another outstanding non-fiction title from this past year is Richard J. Bleiler's study of Arthur Machen's 1914 fictional newspaper story, "The Angels of Mons", being taken up as a real event. The Strange Case of "The Angels of Mons": Arthur Machen's World War I Story, the Insistent Believers, and His Refutations (McFarland, 2015) is a kind of casebook which reprints a great deal of the original documents from around one hundred years ago, and puts them in their appropriate context. 

Finally, a small plug for the new French edition of Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), translated by Julie Petonnet-Vincent as Lud-en-Brume (Editions Callidor, 2015), with very nice pencilled illustrations by Hugo de Faucompret.  I wish all the illustrations had been in color, like the cover (see below).  The book includes translations of Neil Gaiman's Preface from 2000 and my own Introduction from 2005.

The Sesquicentennial of M.P. Shiel

A rare photo of Shiel in 1908

A quick post to let us all reflect upon the 150th anniversary of the birth of Matthew Phipps Shiel, who was born in Montserrat on 21 July 1865.  Author of such classic works as Prince Zaleski (1895), Shapes in the Fire (1896), The Purple Cloud (1901), and many others, Shiel settled in England in the mid 1880s, and died in Chichester, Sussex, on 17 February 1947.

Harold Billings is the author of M.P. Shiel: A Biography of His Early Years (2005), and M.P. Shiel: The Middle Years 1897-1923 (2010).  We look forward to the third and final volume of this definitive biography

Shiel in Penguin Classics

How interesting, at last, to see M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud enter the canon of Penguin Classics.  This new edition has a lengthy introduction, and notes, by John Sutherland, whose Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989; revised 2009) is as useful and wonderful as his more recent Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (2011) is glib and disappointing. 

Sutherland's Introduction to The Purple Cloud repeats and echoes some of the unfortunate glibness of the Shiel entry in Lives of the Novelists (e.g., where the latter refers to "the excessively minor poet John Gawsworth", this dismissal is lightened in the Introduction by the addition of parentheses to "the (excessively) minor poet John Gawsworth"---is such snideness really necessary?). But overall, his Introduction is informative and up-to-date---it is especially rewarding to see the pioneering biographical work of Harold Billings frequently cited, and the work of Kirsten MacLeod as well.  Billings's two volumes (the third is in progress) on Shiel's life are presently available only in the fine small press editions (here is the publisher's webpage for the first volume), and MacLeod's revelatory article is in an academic journal, so it is very good to see the excellent results of years of research being utilized in the mainstream. 

The book is out in England (click here for the Amazon.co.uk link), and should be out soon in the US (click here for the Amazon.com link).