Katsukawa Shun’ei (1762 – 1819) is a Japanese artist of the ukiyo-e aesthetics. Today on my Patreon we take a look at his 1790 Book of Ghost Stories preserved at the MET.

"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows


You might say that this is a historical novel about two pioneer women hunting for fossils on the famed beach of Lyme, one of them being paleontology legend Mary Anning and the other being the less famous fossil hunter and collector Elizabeth Philpot.You’d be wrong,

This is a really splendid collection of stories, some shorter than other, and I wouldn’t have collected them this way: you have proper sci-fi stories and fairy tales, stories about science (with very little fiction), a story on coal mines and a war tale. But,

A few weeks ago, in one of those happy convergences of life, I was reading an Italian essay on Italo Calvino and artificial intelligence (I wrote about it here), and there’s a very interesting set of passages that have to do with our contemporary obsession

You might say that this is a historical novel about two pioneer women hunting for fossils on the famed beach of Lyme, one of them being paleontology legend Mary Anning and the other being the less famous fossil hunter and collector Elizabeth Philpot.You’d be wrong,

This is a really splendid collection of stories, some shorter than other, and I wouldn’t have collected them this way: you have proper sci-fi stories and fairy tales, stories about science (with very little fiction), a story on coal mines and a war tale. But,

A few weeks ago, in one of those happy convergences of life, I was reading an Italian essay on Italo Calvino and artificial intelligence (I wrote about it here), and there’s a very interesting set of passages that have to do with our contemporary obsession
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