Episode 187: The Affirmation of Imagination: On John Crowley's 'Little, Big,' with Erik Davis

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 10:30:00 -0400

John Crowley’s Little, Big is, at once, a family saga, a fairy tale, an occult thriller, an idyll, a dystopia, as well as a meditation on myth and history, the real and the fantasy, memory and imagination. Little, Big is also a book that JF and Phil have been planning to discuss for as long as Weird Studies has existed. In this episode, they are joined by writer and scholar Erik Davis to explore the enduring charms and mysteries of one of the greatest—and most underrated—American novels of the late twentieth century.

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Visit Weirdosphere for more details on Erik Davis's ongoing course, The Three Stigmata of Philip K. Dick.

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REFERENCES

John Crowley, Little, Big
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Eric Davis, interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack
David Lynch (dir.), Lost Highway
America, “The Last Unicorn”
John Cooper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance
J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality
Lord Dunsany, Irish novelist
Special Guest: Erik Davis.

Episode 135: On 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' with Victoria Nelson

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 10:00:00 -0500

Victoria Nelson saw it first: Popular culture teems with occult ideas, vestiges of bygone belief, fragments of ancient magic disguised as common entertainment. Her 2001 work The Secret Life of Puppets is in many ways the ur-text of weird studies, so prescient and probing it is even more relevant now than it was when it first appeared. In episode 128, Phil and JF discussed Nelson's wonderful first novel Neighbor George (2021). In this episode, Nelson joins the hosts of Weird Studies to talk about the vision that drove her to write Secret Life along with its equally insightful follow-up, Gothicka.

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Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

SHOW NOTES

Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, Gothicka, Neighbor George

M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight series
William P. Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity _
Against Everyone with Conner Habib, episodes 202 & 203
James R. Lewis, _The Gods Have Landed
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Honoré de Balzac, "Séraphîta"
L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology

Special Guest: Victoria Nelson.

Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Imagination”

Episode 187: The Affirmation of Imagination: On John Crowley's 'Little, Big,' with Erik Davis

Episode 135: On 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' with Victoria Nelson