This scholarly exploration of the borderlands between science and fantasy features four complete works by the redoubtable Charle Fort (1874-1932): The Book of the Damned, Lo!, Wild Talents, and New Lands. All concern the bizarre phenomena unexplained by traditional science that the author spent the better part of three decades documenting: flying saucers, telekinesis, sudden showers of fish from the sky, stigmata, poltergeists, and spontaneous combustion (to name a few). Fort's florid style and freakish subjects were much critiziced by his contemporaries, but he was defended and admired by an equal number of readers, including such noteworthies as Theodore Dreiser, Clarence Darrow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Stimulating, bewildering, and intoxicating, this intellectual tour de force is a must for lovers of science fiction as well as science facts.

Poetry. African American Studies. "MRS. BELLADONNA'S SUPPER CLUB WALTZ contains work that is a rarity in American literature: a trilogy of prose poems. Charles Fort explores the Other through the use of an elaborate persona. 'Darvil, ' he notes, is a 'composite of devil and evil, ' but he gives him a noble lineage: 'direct descendent of Leo Africanus.' In deconstructing the great patchwork quilt that is American culture, Fort undermines any notion of the Other while understanding all too well the reality of it. His poems are jazzy riffs through Fourth of July bombast, Native American lore, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and the detritus of a post-war materialism. And his comedy is Swiftian; he is most brutally funny when he is angriest."--Donald Soucy"Charles Fort rises above the regional and the racial to where true freedom resides--in the core of the imagination."--ET Malone, Jr.Fort's two previous books in the trilogy appeared in 1993 and 2001: Darvil, and Frankenstein Was A Negro. One can hear the webbed footsteps of Darvil on the streets of Paris close behind the broken walking sticks thrown down by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine. The Darvil Nightmares may end.

Charles Fort's classic recording of unexplained, paranormal events and phenomena offer fascinating insights into bizarre occurrences the author felt had been unjustly damned from formal, scientific study. The title derives from the author's perception that the book's subjects were so stigmatized and excluded from ordinary scientific inquiry that they had become 'damned'. Perhaps permanently forbade for formal study, the oddities and unexplained events in this text were felt worthy of attention by the author, who eventually became an authority on anomalous phenomena. The topics in Fort's thesis include unexplained disappearances of large groups of people, frogs and fish suddenly raining from the sky, the possibility that mythical beasts such as giants exist, UFOs manifest as glowing and sometimes moving lights in the sky, and bizarre weather phenomena. Fort attributes credence to many of these oddities, and argues that science - by dismissing them - has become a religion in itself.

Charles Fort's classic recording of unexplained, paranormal events and phenomena offer fascinating insights into bizarre occurrences the author felt had been unjustly damned from formal, scientific study. The title derives from the author's perception that the book's subjects were so stigmatized and excluded from ordinary scientific inquiry that they had become 'damned'. Perhaps permanently forbade for formal study, the oddities and unexplained events in this text were felt worthy of attention by the author, who eventually became an authority on anomalous phenomena. The topics in Fort's thesis include unexplained disappearances of large groups of people, frogs and fish suddenly raining from the sky, the possibility that mythical beasts such as giants exist, UFOs manifest as glowing and sometimes moving lights in the sky, and bizarre weather phenomena. Fort attributes credence to many of these oddities, and argues that science - by dismissing them - has become a religion in itself.