Following the success of Handheld Press’s 2019 best-selling anthology Women’s Weird, British Weird is a new anthology of classic Weird short fiction by British writers, first published between the 1890s and the 1930s. To be published alongside the second Women’s Weird anthology, Melisa Edmundson’sWomen’s Weird 2, this collection — curated by James Machin, author of Palgrave Gothic’s Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939 — assembles stories to thrill, entertain, and chill. Featured stories that embrace the famous and the undeservedly obscure include:
‘Man-Size in Marble’ by Edith Nesbit (1893)
‘No-Man’s Land’, John Buchan (1900)
‘The Willows’, by Algernon Blackwood
‘The Man Who Went Too Far’, by E F Benson (1912)
‘All Hallows’ by Walter de la Mare (1926)
‘N’ by Arthur Machen (1934)
‘Mappa Mundi’ by Mary Butts (1937)
Machin’s introduction describes the background for these excellent stories in the Weird tradition, and identifies their use of peculiarly British preoccupations in supernatural short fiction.
