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"Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might / Forget how we imagined light." - The Twilight of EarthPublished in September 1935, just two months after his death, A.E wrote of Selected Poems, "If I should be remembered I would like it to be for the verses in this book. They are my choice out of the poetry I have written." A.E's life-long friend and sometimes rival, W.B. Yeats, observed that his poetry expresses "something that lies beyond the range of expression", and that he has within him "the vast and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart." To commemorate the 150th anniversary of A.E.'s birth, Swan River Press is pleased to reissue this career-spanning collection of poems from a key artist of the Celtic Revival. This volume includes selections from The Earth Breath, Voices of the Stones, The House of the Titans, and others, introducing a new generation to Ireland's foremost mystical poet.

"Till human voices wake us, and we drown." - T. S. EliotIn her first collection, award-winning author Helen Grant plumbs the depths of the uncanny: Ten fathoms down, where the light filtering through the salt water turns everything grey-green, something awaits unwary divers. A self-aggrandising art critic travelling in rural Slovakia finds love with a beauty half his age-and pays the price. In a small German town, a nocturnal visitor preys upon children; there is a way to keep it off-but the ritual must be perfect. A rock climber dares to scale a local crag with a diabolical reputation, and makes a shocking discovery at the top. In each of these seven tales, unpleasantries and grotesqueries abound-and Grant reminds us with each one that there can be fates even worse than death.

"The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours." - Thibaut de Castries Serialised in 1977, The Pale Brown Thing is a shorter version of Fritz Leiber's World Fantasy Award-winning novel of the supernatural, Our Lady of Darkness. Leiber maintained that the two texts "should be regarded as the same story told at different times"; thus this volume reprints The Pale Brown Thing for the first time in nearly forty years, with an introduction by the author's friend, Californian poet Donald Sidney-Fryer. The novella stands as Leiber's vision of 1970s San Francisco: a city imbued with an eccentric vibe and nefarious entities, in which pulp writer Franz Westen uncovers an alternate portrait of the city's fin de siecle literary set-Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Clark Ashton Smith-as well as the darker invocations of occultist Thibaut de Castries and a pale brown inhabitant of Corona Heights.

"I know there is a God-a dreadful God-and that retribution follows guilt." - "The Watcher"For the first time in over 150 years, "The Watcher", Le Fanu's classic tale of supernatural menace, is reissued from the pages of the Dublin University Magazine along with its original companion piece "The Fatal Bride", a brooding gothic novella not reprinted since its first publication in 1848. Like matched duelling pistols, Reminiscences of a Bachelor offers the most exquisite balance of craftsmanship, beauty, and peril. In these tales of Old Dublin, honour is ever at stake, the fate of lovers lies mired in the past, and something even worse than deceit stalks the streets, something just as deadly to the soul as it is to the flesh.

Each story in November Night Tales is a differently colored gem whose many facets reflect the lively mind of the author. Henry C. Mercer's life-long interest in world mythology, fairy tales, local legend, symbols, and artifacts form the fabric of his tales. Here, the reader will find vanishing castles, secret sects, biological weapons, sinister wilderness, lycanthropy, possessed dolls, and mythical lands. The characters in each story are driven to explore the unknown, face their fears, and perhaps discover something of themselves in the process. The compelling narratives, infused with intelligence and humanity, leave the reader curious why the stories remain virtually unknown today, and mournful that there are not more to explore. United at last with the six original November night tales is a seventh, posthumously published story, The Well of Monte Corbo. First published in 1928, this new edition is fully illustrated by Alisdair Wood and features an introduction by Peter Bell.

"Death's but a Path that must be trod, / If Man wou'd ever pass to God" - Thomas ParnellLongsword, Earl of Salisbury, by eighteenth century Dublin-born clergyman Thomas Leland, is a fast-paced historical romance of medieval menace and high excitement. Set in the early years of the thirteenth century, it features a blend of real and created characters in a mêlée of intrigue, corruption, lust, and revenge. In part a metaphor for the tug-of-war between the sexes, Longsword is the definitive precursor to the Gothic novel; both in trappings and in style, it provides vital elements of prototype for Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Lewis's The Monk. Through Longsword, Leland emerges as a forerunner of fellow Dublin clergyman Charles Robert Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer. This 250th anniversary edition is edited and introduced by Albert Power.

Clotilde Graves was known for challenging convention. In her early years, she was known as the dramatist "Clo Graves", but became better known under her fiction-writing persona, "Richard Dehan". She transgressed contemporary gender norms by dressing in male attire, wearing her hair short, and smoking in public. This border crossing can be seen also in her work, which encompasses a wide variety of forms and modes. And while she wrote relatively few fantastical stories, she was devoted to tales of lingering revenants, mysterious cryptids, and grotesque sciences-often laced with her sardonic sense of humour. This volume seeks to recover this side of Graves's writing by including stories from across her career, which challenge definition and range across the speculative genres.

"Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?" - Shirley JacksonA woman returns home to revisit an encounter with the numinous; couples take up residence in houses full of sinister secrets; a man fleeing a failed marriage discovers something ancient and unknowable in rural Ireland . . .In her introduction, Lisa Tuttle observes that "certain places are doomed, dangerous in some inexplicable, metaphysical way", and the characters in these stories all seem drawn in their own ways to just such places, whether trying to return home or endeavouring to get as far from life as possible. These nine stories by Shirley Jackson Award winner Lynda E. Rucker tell tales of those lost and searching, often for something they cannot name, and encountering along the way the uncanny embedded in the everyday world.

Katharine Tynan is not a name immediately associated with the supernatural. However, like many other writers of the early twentieth century, she made numerous forays into literature of the ghostly and macabre, and throughout her career produced verse and prose that conveys a remarkable variety of eerie themes, moods, and narrative forms.From her early, elegiac stories, inspired by legends from the West of Ireland, to pulpier efforts featuring grave-robbers and ravenous rats, Tynan displays an eye for weird detail, compelling atmosphere, and a talent for rendering a broad palette of uncanny effects.The Death Spancel and Others is the first collection to showcase Tynan's tales of supernatural events, prophecies, curses, apparitions, and a pervasive sense of the ghastly.

In the late-nineteenth century Rosa Mulholland (1841-1921) achieved great popularity and acclaim for her many novels, written for both an adult audience and younger readers. Several of these novels chronicled the lives of the poor, often incorporating rural Irish settings and folklore. Earlier in her career, Mulholland became one of the select band of authors employed by Charles Dickens to write stories for his popular magazine All the Year Round, together with Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Amelia B. Edwards. Mulholland's best supernatural and weird short stories have been gathered together in the present collection, edited and introduced by Richard Dalby, to celebrate this gifted late Victorian "Mistress of the Macabre".

The bestselling Irish author B. M. Croker enjoyed a highly successful literary career from 1880 until her death forty years later. Her novels were witty and fast moving, set mostly in India and her native Ireland. Titles such as Proper Pride (1882) and Diana Barrington (1888) found popularity for their mix of romantic drama and Anglo-Indian military life. And, like many late-Victorian authors, Croker also wrote ghost stories for magazines and Christmas annuals. From the colonial nightmares such as "The Dak Bungalow at Dakor" and "The North Verandah" to the more familiar streets of haunted London in "Number Ninety", this collection showcases fifteen of B. M. Croker's most effective supernatural tales.

Irish women have long produced literature of the gothic, uncanny, and supernatural. Bending to Earth draws together twelve such tales. While none of the authors herein were considered primarily writers of fantastical fiction during their lifetimes, they each wandered at some point in their careers into more speculative realms - some only briefly, others for lengthier stays.Names such as Charlotte Riddell and Rosa Mulholland will already be familiar to aficionados of the eerie, while Katharine Tynan and Clotilde Graves are sure to gain new admirers. From a ghost story in the Swiss Alps to a premonition of death in the West of Ireland to strange rites in a South Pacific jungle, Bending to Earth showcases a diverse range of imaginative writing which spans the better part of a century.

Joel Lane's award-winning stories have been widely praised, notably by other masters of weird fiction such as M. John Harrison, Graham Joyce, and Ramsey Campbell. His tales also regularly appeared in the "best of" annual anthologies of Ellen Datlow, Karl Edward Wagner, and Stephen Jones. With this posthumous collection, Lane continues his unflinching exploration of the human condition."The Anniversary of Never is a group of tales concerned with the theme of the afterlife," observed Lane, "and the idea that we may enter the afterlife before death, or find parts of it in our world." These stories of love and death will burrow deep into the reader's mind and impregnate it with a vision often as bleak as the night is black.

Despite her wide contributions to genre literature, Irish author L. T. Meade is now remembered, if at all, for her girls' school stories. However, in 1898 the Strand Magazine, famous for its fictions of crime, detection, and the uncanny, proclaimed Meade one of its most popular writers for her contributions to its signature fare. Her stories, widely published in popular fin de siècle magazines, included classic tales of the supernatural, but her specialty was medical or scientific mysteries featuring doctors, scientists, occult detectives, criminal women with weird powers, unusual medical interventions, fantastic scientific devices, murder, mesmerism, and manifestations of insanity. Eyes of Terror and Other Dark Adventures is the first collection to showcase the best of her pioneering strange fiction.

Lucy M. Boston is best remembered today as the Carnegie Medal-winning author of a series of children's novels set in Green Knowe, an ancient, haunted house based on Hemingford Grey Manor near Huntingdon, Cambridge. She began writing these chilling tales when she was already in her sixties, but they were not her first attempts at fiction. A handful of supernatural tales dating from the early 1930s exist among her papers, and these are here published together for the first time, along with her only play, The Horned Man, which has been out of print since 1970. An introduction by Robert Lloyd Parry considers the literary influences on these works and looks at them in the context of Boston's personal life.Of the short stories in this volume only three have been published before - "Curfew", "The Tiger-Skin Rug" and "Many Coloured Glass" - all having appeared originally in long out of print anthologies for children. Children play pivotal roles in the first two of these stories, but there is nothing specifically juvenile about their language or themes, nothing to exclude them from a mature bookshelf. Indeed in her use of children as witnesses and victims of the supernatural, Boston was - consciously or otherwise - emulating that other great East Anglian supernaturalist, M. R. James.Boston's debt to James, in fact, runs deep. The stories collected here offer the same unmistakeable, inexplicable malice that we find in James, and the same lurking feeling of terror: what Boston calls in "Curfew" the "thrill, or chill, of expectation". And like James's most celebrated stories, most of those collected here centre around antiquarian objects - an old bell, a rug bought at auction, an intricately carved desk left in a house by a previous occupant - curious trouvés, artefacts of the past that carry more than memories with them.

A mentally disturbed woman is entrapped by Beltane rituals in the Cumbrian fells; a widower mourning his wife falls beneath the mystic allure of Iona; a quest to the Italian Apennines brings a lonely man to a dread Marian revelation; an alcoholic on a Scottish isle is haunted by a deceased chronicler of local legend; in a small German town a sinister doll discloses truths about a murky family tragedy; an unknown journal by a Victorian travel-writer sends a woman on a grim odyssey to Transylvania; in a childhood holiday paradise a man encounters a demented artist's terrifying legacy. The protagonists in Peter Bell's stories confront the awesome, the numinous, the uncanny, the lure of the genius loci, and landscapes undergoing strange epiphanies.

Ghosts contains R.B. Russell's debut publications, Putting the Pieces in Place and Bloody Baudelaire. Enigmatic and enticing, they combine a respect for the great tradition of supernatural fiction, with a chilling contemporary European resonance. With original and compelling narratives, Russell's stories offer the reader insights into the more hidden, often puzzling, impulses of human nature, with all its uncertainty and intrigue. There are few conventional shocks or horrors on display, but you are likely to come away with the feeling that there has been a subtle and unsettling shift in your understanding of the way things are. This book is a disquieting journey through twilight regions of love, loss, memory, and ghosts.