Method and Madness

I’m joined by the Portuguese fiction writer and aphorist Laeth for a conversation about jazz, writing as discovery, listening for the voice, and his singular work, including his most recent novel SKETCHES OF ALICE
Laeth’s website (buy SKETCHES OF ALICE and his other books)
Laeth on substack
Laeth on twitter

Out of the archives of The Black Mask—the magazine that launched the careers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler—comes a tale by Harold Ward, an unsung hero paid pennies by the word.

Inspector Des Moines is clever, tough, and no nonsense, but when dead people start pulling heists, he has to call on the enigmatic Mohammed Gunga to wage battle against evil itself.

A tarot reading on the things that enslave us, self-medicating and scrolling, and organizing one's mental state to bring vision into reality. Contact me via your favorite social media or bradwkellyATgmail with TAROT in the subject to set up a personal reading for a reasonable fee.

In which we go deep into the life of John Williams: oil booms, abandonment, tall tales about WW2, booze, women, and three “perfect” novels.

In this clip, I get into the influence of Yvor Winters’ odd brand of classicism on one of the 20th Century’s greatest novelists.

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Clark Ashton Smith was a poet once called “The Last of the Great Romantics".” But he is more remembered as one of the three most significant writers of pulp mainstay Weird Tales. H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith who was perhaps even stranger in his vision than either of them.

“The Nameless Offspring” first appeared in Strange Tales in 1932. A tale of family secrets, a haunted manor, and a beast we’d now refer to as a Pale Crawler.