Daughters of the Air will be out in just four short weeks, so we wanted to get to know author Anca L. Szilágyi first. If you're in Seattle on December 5, join us for the Daughters of the Air launch party at Hotel Sorrento hosted by Hugo House. (Find more details on the Hugo House website.)

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Welcome! Please introduce yourself for any readers who aren't yet familiar with you and your work.

I was born Queens and raised in Brooklyn. I feel an affinity for those two sprawling boroughs of New York; large cities have always inspired me. It's no surprise, then, that I married a map-loving urban planner! These days we live in misty Seattle. Even though it's been nine years since we moved west, I still marvel at the flora of the Pacific Northwest--lavender, rosemary, and artichokes grow wild in the street, and the magnolia tree in our yard bursts into intoxicating lemon-velvet-scented blossoms.  

My writing is an elastic sort of realism--gritty or fabulist or both. Growing up, I gobbled myths, fairy tales, Narnia; later on books like The Tin Drum, Invisible Man, and The Bloody Chamber left a mark on me.  I like to stretch form too--increasingly I'm experimenting with lyric essays, mostly related to food, art, memory, and culture. Many of the essays, my short fiction, and obliquely, Daughters of the Air, draw on my family's experiences during the Holocaust and the Communist dictatorship in Romania, and as immigrants and refugees in 1970s-80s New York City.

Pluta is the teenage girl at the heart of Daughters of the Air. Tell us a bit about where she comes from.

In high school, I took choreography workshops at the Gowanus Arts Exchange, a vibrant arts space in a creepy, creaky former soap factory. I've been obsessed with the strangeness of Gowanus ever since--it felt so odd and secretive and dangerous. Pluta is also quite strange; the earliest seeds of the book are her dreams, which came to me while recovering from surgery in 2001 (which I wrote about here). I kept thinking about her, and picturing her alone in Gowanus, but I didn't know why. At some point between 2001 and 2003, I began worrying about the rhetoric of the War on Terror; there seemed to be some troubling similarities with Argentina's Dirty War, and that history became part of Pluta's.

Back in September, we went on a bit of a crawl through parts of Brooklyn as you showed me a few parts of Gowanus that Pluta discovers over the course of the novel. Are there any settings from Daughters of the Air that no longer exist?

Gowanus is very different these days. There were no luxury condos back in the mid-late 1990s, when I was dancing there, and certainly not in 1980. The Public Place is what has changed the most, or at least it has for me, because I'd spent so much time looking at it, especially as the F train soars over it. Before my time, it was the site of a manufactured gas plant, then it was the fenced up patch of wilderness included in Daughters of the Air. Now it's paved over. The iconic neon Kentile Floors sign, which could be seen from the train, is also gone, though it may be coming back to a playground in the neighborhood. 

What comes next for you as a writer?

Embarking on the tenth draft of my second novel! It's about a struggling diorama artist working as a paralegal in 2008, set against the backdrop of the Bernie Madoff scandal. There's a third novel on the back burner, and some short stories and essays floating around in the ether.

Where can readers visit you online?

My website is ancawrites.com and I'm on Twitter (@ancawrites) and Instagram (anca_szilagyi). Come say hi!

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. It goes back to when I was a four-year-old kid, learning to draw ghosts and witches with a clumsily held pencil. I'd bring the drawings to my mom and she'd indulge me by shrieking and cowering in fright. I was too little to know she was pretending; I really believed my drawings could strike terror into a grownup's heart. The power was intoxicating! Muahaha.

Costumes, dark and spooky atmospherics, the once-a-year chance to flirt with the idea that there might be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy: what's not to like about Halloween?

Looking for a literary way to enhance your celebration of this spookiest of holidays? Visit the Academy of American Poets list of Halloween-themed poems and marinate yourself in some gorgeously spooky language: 

The south-wind strengthens to a gale, 
Across the moon the clouds fly fast, 
The house is smitten as with a flail, 
The chimney shudders to the blast. 

On such a night, when Air has loosed
Its guardian grasp on blood and brain, 
Old terrors then of god or ghost
Creep from their caves to life again; 

And Reason kens he herits in
A haunted house. Tenants unknown
Assert their squalid lease of sin
With earlier title than his own. (more)

(If you enjoy that and you're still craving more, you can move on to their lists of vampire poems, ghost poems, and poems about the underworld.) 

My suggestion, once your head is full of all these creepy words? Wander distracted upon a blasted heath or a lonely moor, wearing a bit of lace at your throat. Listen to the sound of the wind--or are those voices crying? Try not to go mad; but write a poem, either way. 

Don't have a blasted heath or a lonely moor handy? That's okay; you can read "A Sublime Contagion," Sarah Perry's essay on the ancient roots of gothic literature, at Aeon Magazine:

As I walked the green miles of the Undercliff where the French Lieutenant’s Woman met her lover, there came a change of air. The dense undergrowth was obscenely verdant — bees worrying at pink rhododendron, peacock butterflies crossing my path — and now and then I’d burst out and find I stood at the cliff’s edge overlooking the sands of Golden Cap. It was impossible to imagine any other human setting foot where I’d set mine. When the path sank into a darker place and I found myself among the ruins of a great house, I shivered as if I’d grown cold. A high, pale-stoned wall with windows pointed at the upper edge put a black shadow at my feet, and fragments of its foundations were scattered about like broken teeth. A little further on I could see the wet black lip of a well. There was a thick silence. (more)

Then? Write a poem.

'Tis the season, right? I have to admit that I'm not exactly the biggest fan of horror - I'm easily grossed out by gore and an easy target for jump scares. But give me the right kind of creepy and I'll be left thinking about a book long after I've finished it.

With Halloween coming up fast, I've picked out 5 creepy-as-heck novels that might not scare you, persay, but leave an impression of lingering unease days or even weeks later.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Listing anything by Shirley Jackson might actually count as cheating, because there are few authors with as much mastery over terror. My introduction to Jackson's work was in high school, when my high school English class read her short story "The Lottery." (If you've never checked out any of Jackson's work and don't want to commit to a novel, "The Lottery" is a short story that should be on your list.)

The Haunting of Hill House is a slim tome that packs a major punch. Four characters gather in the eponymous Hill House at the behest of one of them, Dr. Montague, who is researching supernatural phenomena in the old house.

Anyone who's ever watched a horror movie understands that this is a terrible idea.

The supernatural phenomena experienced by the characters during their time at Hill House are difficult to explain, though the reader is left with a number of possibilities. Hailed by such diverse sources as The Wall Street Journal and Stephen King, Jackson's Hill House is a classic of psychological terror that's defined haunted house stories for generations.

World War Z by Max Brooks

Now for an about-face: Max Brooks' World War Z features one of the least subtle terrors in the genre: a world-wide zombie horde.

What really sets World War Z apart is the way it's framed: as the tagline on the cover indicates, it's crafted as an "oral history" of the events surrounding the zombie war, gathered by a journalist who makes rare appearances in the story. 

(I'm to understand that this journalist is played by Brad Pitt in the film version, but also that the journalist is basically the only similarity between the two forms of media.)

What makes World War Z frightening is this very framework. The journalistic style and the way each narrator's speaking style is crafted manages to achieve nearly-complete suspension of disbelief, leaving the reader with the unsettling feeling of reading a historical document from the future.

Another by Yukito Ayatsuji

Another is almost a marriage of what makes The Haunting of Hill House and World War Z frightening. In this paranormal horror story, a teenage boy transfers to a new school, where all of the students ignore a single girl in the class. Convinced they're bullying her, he tries to befriend her, only to discover the students had been trying to stave off a deadly curse - and by acknowledging her existence, he undid it all.

While Japanese horror tends toward the psychological, Another forces readers to face one of the terrifying concepts of zombie fiction: that death can come for anyone at any time, indiscriminately.

I'd say Another is more similar to Hill House in terms of its reliance on psychological horror and supernatural phenomena, but one thing I appreciate about the novel is that there's simply no explanation for why it happens. Unlike Hill House, which offers a few possible "solutions" to the events of the story, the supernatural events of Another have no explanation. They just happen. Which might be the scariest thing of all.

The Afflictions by Vikram Paralkar

An encyclopedia of diseases always has the potential to leave a lingering impression of unease, depending on a person's nature, but Vikram Paralkar's The Afflictions isn't just any encyclopedia of diseases. It's an encyclopedia of fictional diseases - illnesses of the spirit rather than illnesses of the body.

Conveyed through short encyclopedic entries, The Afflictions explores maladies that are all existential or philosophical rather than physical. As with World War Z, the book's framework is what makes it even more terrifying: the diseases seem utterly real, as if at any moment the reader could contract an affliction that might make them disappear from the memories of those around them.

While not precisely scary, The Afflictions is the sort of book that makes you lie awake in bed at night, contemplating what you've just finished reading, which for some readers is truly the goal.

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

Like just about every other American-raised kid, I grew up watching the Scooby-Doo cartoons in just about every iteration, reading the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys and Boxcar Childrens that my local library provided, and did go through the "mystery novel stage" that seems so common in American elementary schools.

Edgar Cantero's Meddling Kids knows this and seizes upon it, shaking readers hard and refusing to let go.

While I expected a nostalgia trip featuring a rubber-masked bad guy based on the cover, the book was a deep dive into reflections of twenty-somethings on the events of their childhood with one very unsettling addition: the idea that the monsters you feared during childhood were, in fact, very real, and that they're not especially interested in leaving you alone now that you're an adult.

Collingswood Book Festival

Our first time at a local book festival with a surprising number of author connections

Just a hop-skip away from our home base in Philadelphia is the Collingswood Book Festival, an annual one-day event held in Collingswood, New Jersey. 

It was our first time at this event, so we took the opportunity to make a few new friends (and hang out with one of our authors.)

Philly's Lanternfish Press represents at Collingswood Book Fair pic.twitter.com/x1FhJr703g

— Kevin Riordan (@Inqkriordan) October 7, 2017

Other Worlds artist Saul Rosenbaum stopped by to sign a few things and hang out with us in the slightly hot but otherwise lovely day. 

#collsbook #Otherworlds #coloringbook

4 Likes, 1 Comments - Catherine Gladney Gross (@cat92155) on Instagram: "#collsbook #Otherworlds #coloringbook"

You can pick up a copy of Other Worlds on our website! And, if you're in the Philadelphia area, keep an eye out: there may be a few coloring parties on the way.

But that's not our only connection to Collingswood: Salamanders of the Silk Road author Christopher Smith lived in West Collingswood Heights (on Lincoln Avenue) from 1980 through 1987 and graduated from Haddon Township High School in 1987. He attended Audubon United Methodist Church and worked as a busboy at Rexy's Bar and then at Chubby's 1 1/2 Hearth.

We had a wonderful time at the book festival this year, and we look forward to another visit next fall!

Hello internet friends! I'm Amanda, the operations manager here at Lanternfish Press. I usually lurk behind the scenes around here. I'm definitely more than half mountain-top hermit, but it seems like a good time to come out and say hello. 

I spend a lot of time in the outdoors. I read a lot of nature writing too. It provides a respite from all the hubbub and anxiety of modern life, a connection to the wild even when I'm at my desk in Philadelphia. Here are my favorite books to soothe the soul and remind us of our place in the wide universe.

The Outermost House

Henry Beston wrote The Outermost House during a year that he spent living in a tiny cottage on the dunes at the very tip of Cape Cod. It is a truly beautiful piece of writing. Beston's sentences feel like they are spun from pure magic. He describes his motivation:

"The world is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year. The flux and reflux of ocean, the incomings of waves, the gatherings of birds, the pilgrimages of the people of the sea, winter and storm, the splendour of autumn and the holiness of spring-- all these were part of the great beach. The longer I stayed, the more eager was I to know this coast and to share its mysterious and elemental life; I found myself free to do so, I had no fear of being alone, I had something of a field naturalist's inclination; presently I made up my mind to remain and try living for a year on Eastham Beach."

Now, I'm not really a water person. I like solid earth under my feet at all times, but even I can hear the wild call of the ocean in Beston's words. I also really like how Beston has the pulse of modern life, even though The Outtermost House was published in 1928. He describes perfectly the source of my frustrations living in the city and doing work which ties me to a desk and a computer:

"A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual. To share in it, one must have a knowledge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something of that natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the most primitive people mark the summer limits of his advance and the last December ebb of his decline."

My favorite passage from the book points to the relationship between humans and animals. He reminds us that humans are, after all, animals too and our fates are intimately connected:

"Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and see thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the sense we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

I would recommend to The Outtermost House to anyone feeling a little unhinged by the modern world. Bonus points if you enjoy reading aloud (this book is perfect for it!). 

The Living Mountain

The Living Mountain is a book that I don't think I would have found on my own (thanks Christine!). Written during the Second World War and not published until 1977, The Living Mountain is a glimpse into nature at a time of deep human conflict. Nan Shepard offers us a unique perspective on a life spent outside. 

I feel a particular kinship with the book, knowing that the author was definitely a morning person like me.

"I have left at dawn, and up here it is still morning. The midsummer sun has drawn up the moisture from the earth, so that for part of the way I walked in a cloud, but now the last tendril has dissolved into the air and there is nothing in all the sky but light. I can see to the ends of the earth and far up into the sky."

It's also apparent that Nan Shepard really loved spending time outside. She talks about staying out overnight, away from walls and lights, in a way that transports me right into my tent.

No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. One neither thinks, nor desires, nor remembers, but dwells in pure intimacy with the tangible world.

I would recommend The Living Mountain to anyone contemplating reading Walden. Pick this up instead.

Arctic Dreams

Arctic Dreams is a captivating combination of nature writing and science writing in perfect balance. The prose and story telling in the book made me think of the arctic in a whole new way. Plus I learned about fascinating things like Novaya Zemlya images, the formation of sea ice, and fata morgana. 

I particularly enjoyed Lopez's discussion of how humans fit into the arctic environment. 

The arctic reminds one of the desert not only because of the lack of moisture and the barren topography, but because it puts a like strain on human life. It favors tough and practical people, people aware of the vaguest flutter of life in an environment that seems featureless and interminable to the untrained eye. People with a predator's alertness for minutiae, for revealing detail.

Most of us spend our lives separated for the forces of nature. Rarely (if ever) do we find ourselves situations where we must depend on our wits, observation, and experience for our survival in the immediate term. Interactions between humans, animals, and the environment look different when survival is on your mind.

It not only takes a long time of watching the animal before you can say what it is doing; it takes a long time to learn how to watch. This point is raised deferentially but repeatedly, in encounters with Eskimos. They are uneasy, they manage to say about the irrevocability of decisions made by people who are not sensually perceptive, not discriminating in these northern landscapes, not enthusiastic about long term observations. When I hear these points made, my instinct is to nod yes; but it always causes me to reflect on something else-- how dependent we are on Western field biologists to tell us fully and accurately what the animals did while they were there. How we hope they regain some approximation of "the native eye" in their studies.

Lopez's description of the mutual predation between humans and polar bears really resonated with me. He describes the feeling of simultaneous self-sufficiency and dependence that I experience when I'm out backpacking. The feeling that you are out there alone and must rely wholly on yourself, and yet you remain dependent on other humans because you can't stay out there forever.

"To encounter the bear, to meet it with your whole life, was to grapple with something personal. The confrontation occurred on a serene, deadly, and elevated plain. If you were successful you found something irreducible within yourself, like a seed. To walk away was to be alive, utterly. To be assured of your own life, the life of your kind, in a harsh land where life took insight and patience and humor. It was to touch the bear. It was a gift from the bear."

I would recommend Arctic Dreams to anyone who enjoys nature or science writing in a general sense. It is an excellent introduction to the arctic as a place and an ecosystem. It is a humbling and inspiring read. I'll leave you with my favorite passage:

"It was still dark, and I though it might be raining lightly. I pushed back the tent flap. A storm-driven sky moving swiftly across the face of a gibbous moon. Perhaps it would clear by dawn. The ticking sound was not rain, only the wind. A storm, bound for somewhere else."