The great American poet Emily Dickinson has long been seen as a figure isolated from her contemporaries and insulated from her surrounding culture. This book attempts to place her texts in their cultural contexts by exploring her attitude towards death, romance, the afterlife, God, nature and art. Using pertinent parallels, analogues, and glosses, it assesses her response to three levels of general culture: elite, popular, and folk. It attempts to find coherence in the entire canon of her poetry, and to reconstruct the lost sensibility that produced it. The author stresses Dickinson's visual acuity and the pictorial elements of her art, taking issue with recent criticism, which has focused on that art's supposed abstraction and 'scenelessness'. At its widest, the book is not only a cultural biography of Emily Dickinson as an American Victorian, but a biography of American Victorian culture itself, where Dickinson emerges as a 'Representative Woman'.

In this third short story collection, following up on "Midnight Call" (2008) and "Tempting Providence" (2010), Jonathan Thomas continues to demonstrate the skill and emotive power that have made him a dynamic new voice in contemporary weird fiction. This volume opens with a quartet of tales elaborating upon Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, including "Mobymart After Midnight" (a delightful skewering of Walmart culture) and "King of Cat Swamp," an ingenious riff on "The Call of Cthulhu." Other stories treat a variety of weird themes: "Way Up When," about a man who has remarkable precognitive powers; "The Comeuppance Hour," in which the makers of a skeptical TV show about occult phenomena find more than they bargain for; and "A Retouch in Camonica," about strange happenings in an Italian archaeological site. The volume concludes with a "Swedish-American Triptych," in which various protagonists encounter the bizarre in a far Baltic land. Each tale is crafted meticulously and enlivened by a wit and mordant satire that renders them unique in recent weird writing.
"Jonathan Thomas pushes us toward . . . fresh hells, as in his pages we recognize the still startling twenty-first-century disjunction between our own fragmentary human skull and our own residual ape-like jaw."-"From Barton L. St. Armand's Foreword"
"Jonathan Thomas has an enviably impressive range-from the gentle to the gruesome, from science fiction through fantasy to the spectral and horrific-but his wit is reliable, and so is the clarity of his eye, and the precision of his prose. He's an asset to all his fields."-"Ramsey Campbell"

H.P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent was first published in 1979, a date that marks the halfway point between Lovecraft's death and the present day. This corrected publication offers a unique insight into the history of Lovecraft scholarship and describes Lovecraft's roots in the decadent movement of 19th Century Europe. WaterFire Providence is delighted to be publishing this long out of print monograph as part of our commitment to creative placemaking in Providence. I am delighted that we are able to support Professor Emeritus Barton Levi St. Armand in re-releasing his work on the occasion of NecronomiCon Providence 2013. I would like to thank Barton for his time on preparing this corrected edition; Niels-Viggo Hobbs, Director of NecronomiCon Providence; Tim Blankenship, Andrew Doig, and Jess Powers at WaterFire Providence; Edward P. Coderre and Diana R. Coderre at The Digital Ark; and Paul Margrave, Nate Storring, and Emma Sarconi at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University. Without their hard work and engaged support this new edition would not have been possible. This publication is part of WaterFire's on-going exploration of new approaches to creative placemaking through art, design and innovation. This larger creative placemaking program is made possible in part by the support of ArtPlace America.