"Now in the afternoon sun, the trunks of the fir trees were burning red, and the landscape far away seemed cool, all blue and pale gold. Boris was able now to believe what the old gardener at the convent had told him when he was a child: that he had once seen, about this time of the year and day, a herd of unicorns come out of the woods to graze upon the sunny slopes, the white and dappled mares, rosy in the sun, treading daintily and looking around for their young, the old stallion, darker roan, sniffing and pawing the ground. The air here smelled of fir leaves and toadstools, and was so fresh that it made him yawn." — The Monkey, Isak Dinesen
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I studied the above passage in a fantastic creative writing course 7 years ago. It has haunted me ever since with its surreal flow that whips at my imagination. I particularly love the inclusion of the burning red fir trees at twilight, dappled mares rosy in the sun, the scent of toadstools, and Boris' desire to yawn. The writing transfigures radiantly, subtly, effortlessly what Boris sees before him and remembers from the old gardener's story. This passage and countless others are painted so vibrantly throughout Karen Blixen's Seven Gothic Tales. 

The Monkey, The Dreamers, and The Poet were my three favorites among the seven. What Blixen seems to explore most is our relationship to the past. Often characters seem to understand those gone from their lives through others or their own romanticized accounts of them. Identities, perhaps most explicitly in The Monkey, shift beneath moon-lit masks, shatter like a mansion's stained-glass window, and morph in dark forests on stormy nights. Exotic treasures, locations, and myths—snake-charming, hashish-smoking storytellers, brazen golden amulets and coral necklaces, double-rainbow landscapes— are called upon by Blixen to spellbind and suggest, to me, that life back then—but still now—is a little bit more beautiful and strange than meets the eye. [JG]
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Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of of Karen Blixen (1885-1962) a Danish writer whose works include Out of Africa, Seven Gothic Tales, The Angelic Avengers, Winter's Tales, and others. Before writing professionally, she and her husband moved to Kenya (then-British East Africa) and there ran a coffee plantation from 1914 to 1931. Upon returning, Blixen wrote (in English) Seven Gothic Tales and published it in the United States under a pseudonym and without an advance. It was an almost immediate bestseller. In 1937, she wrote Out of Africa, her best known work. When Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954, he famously expressed  Bernard Berenson, Carl Sandburg and Karen Blixen were all more deserving. 

Blixen made just one trip to the United States in 1959 when she was already in poor health, but during her time was able to meet Marilyn Monroe, pictured here, and share some of her drafts of her to-be-published work Ehrengard. She is buried on her family estate Rungstedlund located just outside Copenhagen. 
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"The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away...human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast..." — The Monkey, Isak Dinesen
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"Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe." — Wakefield, Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nathaniel Hawthorne is a treasure. I first encountered him in 9th grade English class by way of his haunting short story, The Birth-Mark. In it, a scientist tragically obsesses over the blemish on his beautiful bride's cheek. Two years later, The Scarlet Letter, was forced upon me in English class, except unlike so many assignment, this one I literally couldn't stop reading. The independent spirit of Hester Prynne, the tormented soul of Arthur Dimmesdale, and the satirically drawn, hypocritical Puritan town were clear, vibrant, dramatic, and haunting. And now, twelve years later, I'm bound by the New Englander's spell after plucking a gorgeously illustrated hardback off the shelf of a 197-year-old barn (yes, actually). Twice Told Tales, first told in various magazines and newspapers of the mid-1800s, is a curation of nearly 30 Hawthorne shorts, 9 dreamy illustrations by Lars Hokanson, and 2 praising Afterwords by Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 

Here are three of my favorite tales... 

The Great Carbuncle — A band of intrepid, yet distinctly motivated explorers search the White Mountains of New England for a fabled gemstone known as the Great Carbuncle. The finder(s) may surprise you. 

The Maypole of Merry Mount — A legend from Salem's earliest days in which a rival colony of forest-dwelling libertines dance beneath a maypole, celebrating the marriage of two youths. 

The Minister's Black Veil — Mr. Hooper returns to his congregation one day with his face hidden behind a black veil. The community speculates as to its meaning and what happened to their preacher. ​[JG]

"As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest. They returned to [the maypole] no more."

— The Maypole of Merry Mount, Nathaniel Hawthorne
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"My prescription for a modern house: first pick a good site. Pick that one at the most difficult site—pick a site no one wants—but pick one that has features making for character: trees, individuality, a fault of some kind in the realtor's mind."

— Frank Lloyd Wright, 1938
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Perhaps the most famous American home ever, Fallingwater was completed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939 for the Kauffman family as a summer home for three. He built it on land in a secluded glen near Bear Run, a river south of Pittsburgh, above a waterfall. This short photograph-rich book explores Wright's style and substance, what he called 'organic architecture' and gives a brief tour through the exterior and interior of the home and connected guest house. Fallingwater is now a UNESCO world heritage site and tourable year round. I grew up five hours away and attended university less than an hour away, yet haven't yet visited. I'm eager to change that now after getting a glimpse courtesy of Waggoner. [JG]
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​Fallingwater offered the Kauffman family what many of the architect's other works also do: 

• a shelter with a vista without and within; protection, but without "feeling cut off from nature"
• a sense of grounding; planes that fit with the site and give a sense of "repose" amidst undisturbed neighbors such as trees and rocks and waterways and other "revered ancestors"
• order through unity of man and nature
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"The corner-window is indicative of an idea conceived early in my work, that the box is a Fascist symbol, and the architecture of freedom and democracy needed something basically better than the box. So I started to destroy the box as a building. Well, the corner-window came in as all the comprehension that was ever given to that act of destruction of the box. The light now came in where it had never come before and vision went out. You had screens for walls instead of box walls—here the walls vanished as walls, the box vanished as a box." — FLW, 1953
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"I had a sudden terrible fleeting illusion that all great men were really stuffing underneath and that all great, brave faces were only wax for Time to melt."

— Dan Cresap, The Golden Sickle

Orphan Dan Cresap is in for the night of his life. Sleeping in the loft of the Golden Sickle, a tavern in post-Revolutionary War Virginia, he is awakened by his dead father's companion and then gifted a strange inheritance: a ring, a string, and a scribbled verse. They are clues to the treasure his father stole, killed for, and hid somewhere before hanging for the crime. Out of the night on the companion's coattails, skulking into the Golden Sickle comes a vengeful dwarf creature, Elisha, who wants the treasure and to kill the son of Jim Cresap personally. Dan must choose to run or followhis father's clues.

This coming-of-age adventure yarn felt like a nightmarish Treasure Island. The autumnal early-America landscape with its spooky woods and uncharted rivers are cast with a band of curious allies and villains: a British ex-soldier, half-frozen Indians, a devious wax-sculptor, perceptive blind girl, and deadly she-pirate. Grubb draws it all brilliantly with blunt, shiny prose that I've come to love: "He puffed a spell...stared at her in the fireshine...and grabbed her by the scruff of her neck like a pup." This is the third novel of Grubb's that I've had the pleasure of tracking down. His storytelling powers seem fit for "a time as lost and gone as this one would be," to use his character Dan Cresap's own summation toward the dark journey's end. Best enjoyed fireside during a thunderstorm with the window cracked. [JG]

Davis Grubb (1919-1980) is best known for his first novel The Night of the Hunter (1953), a dark fairy tale set in the Depression-era West Virginia. (It's one of my favorite novels of all time.) Two years later it was adapted for the screen by actor Charles Laughton's first and only directorial project, which stars Robert Mitchum as Preacher. 

​Davis Grubb went on to write nine other novels and three short story collections, most of which take place in small midwest towns similar to his home of Moundsville, West Virginia. "My earliest literary influences were the tales of the old men in my river town," Grubb claimed, citing the 200-year-lineage of his family in the Ohio Valley, but many of his stories also include fantastical and mystical elements, matched with a uniquely lyrical style. I've read A Tree Full of Stars, Twelve Tales of Suspense, and The Nighter of the Hunter now, and am looking forward in particular to reading his second novel, A Dream of Kings, as it follows a young boy's experience of the American Civil War. ​
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“These considerations lead me to believe that the first human interaction with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses. The consequences of such contact are disturbing when one recalls that 3 per cent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.”

​— Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain
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An American military space probe crashes twelve miles outside a sleepy Arizona town. Within hours, everyone is dead except an infant and a senior citizen. In response, U.S. officials mobilize Project Wildfire, a top-secret emergency protocol to handle deadly outbreaks. They summon a team of elite biophysicists and rush them into a five-level, atomic-warhead-laden lab in some undisclosed, underground location to study the bacteria found on the space probe. Time is ticking. Mark Kelly and the other three scientists must work to contain The Andromeda Strain—without contaminating the lab—or the world. Nukes are set to self-destruct as a fail-safe, but would that even be enough?

Inspired by the the protocol for oil spills in oceans and declassified military procedures for handling deadly disease outbreaks, Crichton's first techno-thriller(published 1969) is a relentlessly paced mystery that seems all too plausible in 2019. His calling card here as it was throughout his career was to stay within the realm of what was possible, or at least "what's not known to be impossible" and marry current, unconventional scientific ideas with a thrilling situation. Andromeda didn't quite sweep me up like his later works--Disclosure (explores sexual harassment where the woman is the aggressor), State of Fear (climate science vs. climate politics), Jurassic Park (bioengineering and chaos theory)—but it has so much of the author's instincts of how to get me to keep turning the page. [JG]
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Michael Crichton (1942-2008) remains the only writer to have a #1 book, movie, and TV show in the same year in the USA. His novels include Sphere, The Lost World, Eaters of the Dead, State of Fear, and Dragon Teeth among others. Collectively his works have sold over 200 million copies worldwide, translated into thirty-eight languages, and provided the basis for fifteen films. He was also the director of Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and Looker. ​​Steven Spielberg, who adapted Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World to the silver screen, called Crichton "The High King of High Concept" for his ability to create stories that grab an audience's imagination and keep them turning the page. Crichton appeared on The Charlie Rose Show several times in the '90s and early 2000s. I continue to enjoy those interviews as he discusses science, medicine, psychology, biology, and computers. Crichton strikes me as a deeply skeptical yet voraciously curious, private yet warm person.
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"There are millions of species of bacteria, and thousands of species of insects. There are only a few species of primates and only four of great apes. There is but one species of man."
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— Michael Crichton, on the odds of encountering complex extraterrestrial life