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Myth & Folklore
Frightful Folklore of North America by Mike Bass
£17.09 £18.99
This beautifully illustrated book offers scary legends and folklore from Canada to Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, including Native American tales, settlers' stories and African-American legends, as well as ghost stories and modern tales of cryptids and aliens and a few urban legends. Shake in your shoes as you read about:Qalupalik of the Inuit These green slimy web-handed creatures hunt along the ice floes in the water in the Arctic regions, kidnapping children that wander too close. La Corriveau of Quebec, a woman hanged for murder and witchcraft, runs through the night in her gibbet chasing her victims.
The Ghost Moose of Maine: Hunters pursue this spectral creature until they perish from some woodland accident or die of starvation. Resurrection Mary of Illinois is the ghost of a woman killed in a hit-and-run accident outside a Chicago dancehall who asks for a ride home and then disappears from your vehicle by Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, IL. Goatman of Alton Bridge Texas: a goatherder murdered in the early 1900s has returned as a half-goat, half-man to torment people who try to cross the bridge.
La Diabless of Tobago Is a young woman who made a pact with the devil. When in human form, she entraps men with her beauty and leads them astray into dark places, where they meet an untimely end. You can recognize her by her smell which is a combination of sweet perfume and decay.
You may also notice one of her feet is actually a cow's hoof. The Camazotz of Mexico are large man-bats that lived in the forest and hunt humans in packs. And many, many more! Great for campfire storytelling or as a chill-inducing gift, this is the most readable and attractive book of spooky folklore on the market.
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The Slavic Myths by Noah Charney & Svetlana Slapsak
£18.00 £20.00
Pulitzer-nominated author and one of the great public intellectuals of Slavic culture bring to life the unfamiliar myths and legends of the Slavic world. Slavic cultures are far-ranging, comprising of East Slavs (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus), West Slavs (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland) and South Slavs (the countries of former Yugoslavia plus Bulgaria), yet they are connected by tales of adventure and magic with deep roots in a common lore. In this first collection of Slavic myths for an international readership, Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapsak expertly weave together a retelling of the ancient stories with nuanced analysis that illuminates their place at the heart of Slavic tradition.
Though less familiar to us than the legends of ancient Egypt, Greece and Scandinavia, in the world of Slavic mythology we find much that we can recognize: petulant deities, demons and faeries; witches, the sinister vestica, whose magic may harm or heal; a supreme god who can summon storms and hurl thunderbolts. Gods gather under the World Tree, reminiscent of Norse mythology's Yggdrasill; or, after the coming of Christianity, congregate among the clouds. The vampire - usually the only Serbo-Croatian word in any foreign-language dictionary - and the werewolf emerge from the shallow graves of Slavic belief.
In their careful analysis and sensitive reconstructions of the origin stories, Charney and Slapsak unearth the Slavic beliefs before their distortion first by Christian chroniclers and then by 19th-century scholars seeking origin stories for their new-born nation states. They reveal links not only to the neighbouring pantheons of Greece, Rome, Egypt and Scandinavia but also the belief systems of indigenous peoples of Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia. In so doing, they draw out the universalities that cut across cultures in the stories we tell ourselves.
The Watkins Book of English Folktales by Neil Philip
£13.49 £14.99
This is a golden treasury of over one hundred English folktales captured in the form they were first collected in past centuries. Read these classic tales as they would have been told when storytelling was a living art - when the audience believed in boggarts and hobgoblins, local witches and will-o'-the-wisps, ghosts and giants, cunning foxes and royal frogs. Find "Jack the Giantkiller", "Tom Tit Tot" and other quintessentially English favourites, alongside interesting borrowings, such as an English version of the Grimms' "Little Snow White" - as well as bedtime frighteners, including "Captain Murderer", as told to Charles Dickens by his childhood nurse.
Neil Philip has provided a full introduction and source notes on each story that illustrate each tale's journey from mouth to page, and what has happened to them on the way. These tales rank among the finest English short stories of all time in their richness of metaphor and plot and their great verbal dash and daring.
England on Fire by Stephen Ellcock & Mat Osman
£22.50 £25.00
This is a book about English art like no other. Forget the tired rogues' gallery of lords and ladies, forget the tall ships and haywains. These images cut to the heart of England's psychic landscapes to portray an Albion unhinged, where magic and rebellion and destruction are the horses to which the country is hitched.
On these fabled shores we are all castaways, whether our family has lived here for four thousand years or for four. Here you will find depictions of ancient trackways, chalk carvings and standing stones, of animal-masked community rituals, of streets set ablaze in protest, of occult dreams and psychedelic prophecies. There are over 200 images by artists ranging from William Blake, J.M.W.
Turner and Samuel Palmer to Paul Nash, Louis Wain, Bill Brandt, Derek Jarman and Ithell Colquhoun to present-day visionaries such as Paula Rego, Cathy de Monchaux, George Shaw, Jamie Reid, Matt Collishaw,Tacita Dean, Lina Iris Viktor, Yinka Shonibare, Nick Waplington, Dan Hillier, Nicola Tyson, Sutapa Biswas and Chila Kumari Burman. The mind-blowing selection of images is accompanied by short texts by Mat Osman, exploring magic and mazes, ghosts and gardens, shipwrecks and cities. These poetic renderings of a spectral isle, together with Stephen Ellcock's hallucinatory visual journey, reclaim Albion as an eternally inspiring and anarchic domain - an England on fire.
© 2024 Watkins Books. WATKINS MEDIA LIMITED. COMPANY REGISTRATION NUMBER: 9171151. COMPANY REGISTRATION ADDRESS: SHEPPERTON HOUSE UNIT 11, 89 SHEPPERTON ROAD, LONDON, ENGLAND, N1 3DF.
