Sea Urchin has just published two slim chapbooks that have been put together from a fine pick of papers and have been cut, folded, watercoloured and stitched by hand in limited editions of 15 copies. One is the expressionist poem The Bog (‘Das Moor’, 1913-1914) by German author Gustav Sack and the other the A…
Gustav Sack (1885-1916) grew up in the German village of Schermbeck, close to the Dutch border and the industrial Ruhr district. He attended the grammar school of the nearby town of Wesel and did German Studies and Natural Science at the universities of Greifswald, Münster and Halle before dropping out in 1910. Sack developed an interest in literature during his grammar school days, when he discovered…
‘A Wilderness of Dreams’ is a passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hans Phaall – A Tale’, an early science fiction tale about a balloon flight from Rotterdam to the moon that was published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835. After its first publication ‘Hans Phaall – A Tale’ was revised and reprinted several times and renamed ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall’. A later version, which includes…
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was a short story writer and novelist who is generally regarded as one of the leading representatives of American ‘Dark Romanticism’. Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts and descended from a family of Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the earliest and largest New England colonies. His ancestor John Hathorne was a harsh and unrepentant…
Richard Maxfield (1927-1969) was an American composer of electro-acoustic and electronic music. Maxfield was born in Seattle and wrote his first symphony when he was still in high school. After having served in the US Navy for a year he…