I have some new fiction, “Three Booksellers”, available to read courtesy of ergot. press, an excellent online literary magazine for horror. These stories will be the first in a new series, Ancient Capital, about old Philadelphia, from the earliest period of colonization into the 20th century. I’m very excited about this new venture. The city’s history is long and varied enough to provide unfamiliar material, things that don’t make it onto the usual tourist brochures and tour bus stops. Moreover, Philadelphia has a strong claim to being the birthplace of American fiction, full stop, but especially American horror and supernatural fiction, being the home of Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allen Poe. Living here and being interested in that literature has led to a very neat convergence of interests As I translator, I’ve worked primarily with German literature of the Enlightenment and Romantic period, which was a formative influence on those authors and on early American literature in general. Kleist, Jean Paul, and E.T.A. Hoffmann are just as useful for writing about Philadelphia as anyone born on home soil. I was also influenced by East Asian literature. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, an 18th-century collection of macabre and supernatural fiction by the author Pu Songling, has been a rich source of information. Though the history and general cultural context are completely different, it was still not too difficult to imagine the poor haunted scholars that populate Songling’s fiction transported over to Philadelphia, where they could wander about Society Hill or Rittenhouse Square. It was Japanese literature, though, that furnished the strongest influence. In Japan, people refer to the city of Kyoto as “the ancient capital” in contradistinction to Tokyo, which has been the capital throughout modern history. Philadelphia is a very young city compared to Kyoto, though it is ancient for North America, at least the United States, and could plausibly furnish that antique bespooked feel better than anywhere else in the country, at least outside of New Mexico. I turned to a favorite Japanese writer of mine, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, to help provide that atmosphere. He’s best known to English speaking world as the author of “In a Grove” and “Rashomon”, two stories that became the basis for the Akira Kurosawa film. Akutagawa was one of the first Japanese authors I read, back when I was a teenager, and I found his blend of Japanese history and European modernism intoxicating. It’s been a longstanding goal with my writing, to make America, well, strange again, to strip off accreted layers of normalcy and find something vaster and more atmospheric, beyond appeals to the Founders and the Constitution and the imperial consumer hegemon they created. I leave whether I’ve been successful up to the reader, but these stories have been and will continue to be so much fun to write.
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