The Oikofuge: Reading

A review of Isobel Wylie Hutchison's "On Greenland's Closed Shore" (1930)

An introduction to the seventy-ninth edition of The Angry Corrie hill fanzine, published in memory of its editor and cofounder, Dave Hewitt

A review of Philip Ball's "Alchemy: An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments, and the Birth of Modern Science"

Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man’s relation to it …

“It was a most extraordinary thing, Graham, to see how the different men reacted to the gold. It took them all different ways, just like too much liquor. One would be cold and calculating, and as wicked as Hell; another would be delirious with pleasure; some showed themselves up as the lowest type of killer; …