Pioneering feminist and animal rights campaigner Anna Kingsford was one of the 19th century's most remarkable women. Then she was charged with using black magic to murder two vivisectionists. By Dee Cunning.

We don’t think of Poe as a veteran writer, but his brief stint in the U.S. Army was gloriously successful—until the court martial. By Brian Van Reet.

Mark Twain continues to bedevil the academy, if not the reading public. Like Kipling, he has been by turns reviled and revered, often for the wrong reasons. Daniel Karlin considers the difficulties in dealing with an American classic.

Dion Fortune, Psychic Warfare and the Magical Battle of Britain. By David Metcalfe.

The Measure of Homer bounds acrobatically backwards and forwards across the centuries, from the aristocratic Greek symposium of the sixth century BC to Christian Gdanmaa in the fifth century AD. By Peter Thonemann.

Ezra Glinter surveys the work of Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem.

3 Tax Tips From Zombie Turkeys More precisely, 3 Tax Tips from the author of Zombie Turkeys, the comic paranormal animal adventure. Turkeys, even zombie turkeys, are good at gobbling, not at taxes. So I, author Andy Zach, must step in for my paranormal animal friends. I don't know about you, but I start my taxes in December, finish in January, and file in February.

"I’ve had experience, I know the world. Amuse yourself, ask every passenger to tell you his story, and if you find one, just one, who hasn’t often cursed his life, who hasn’t often told himself he’s the unluckiest of men, throw me headfirst into the sea.’’ – Voltaire.

Steven Jesse Bernstein

More than a decade since his last book, Thomas Harris – author and creator of one of literature’s most famous monsters, the sophisticated, psychopathic cannibal Hannibal Lecter – is set to release a new novel. The as-yet-unnamed novel has long been anticipated since 2004, when Harris signed a reported eight-figure deal for two books. The first was 2006’s Hannibal Rising, but no details of a second have ever been revealed.

A.E. Hotchner, who grew up to be pals with Ernest Hemingway and Paul Newman, just published a mystery about a boy, a long-ago summer and a jewelry heist.

While there was no actual disappearance of schoolgirls at Hanging Rock either around the turn of the century or in the 19-teens when Lindsay attended Clyde School, there was a traumatic disappearance in Lindsay’s near future when she wrote her manuscript: none other than the cutting of her final chapter, with its beauty and strangeness and its mathematical-physical musings. By Eric Wargo.

Why we love Lucifer—and why Milton might have, too. By Edwin M. Yoder Jr.

"Dodgson had taken a travelling chess set with him, which proved a boon on some of their long train journeys; he also recorded his first impression of Moscow as 'bulging gilded domes, in which you see as in a looking-glass distorted pictures of the city.'” By Mark Davies.

Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. He may have been a flaming mediocrity. He may have been credulous and intellectually shallow. He may have produced a scissors-and-paste job cribbed from other ancient sources. But those other sources are lost, which makes what Diogenes Laertius left behind, to quote the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “truly priceless.” By Jim Holt.

Bruno Latour elaborates upon Gaia, a political biological theory concerning the Earth. By James Lovelock.

As corporations take control of nerd culture, science fiction’s most esoteric epic remains gloriously untamed. By Sean T. Collins.

Only in his supposedly lost years was Wilde free to express his genius in his life. By Alex Dean.

There’s no use debating a feeling. It’s time to change how we engage with Jordan Peterson. By Laurie Penny.

Some of the most searing poems by Korzhavin, who has died, at the age of ninety-two, focus on his decision to go into exile, to America, in the seventies. By Masha Gessen.