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The article focuses on how nineteenth-century Icelandic ghost stories reflect a sociocultural process of redefining individuals with intellectual disabilities as supernatural beings, combining folkloristics and disability studies. Topics include the depiction of misfits as ghosts in legends, offering cultural guidance on understanding disabilities, and the fluidity between human and supernatural identities in folklore.

My short story contributes to discussions about the relationship between memory and place. It is set in Muranów, erected on the ashes of the former ghetto, a space of absence and repressed guilt. Even though the quarter was razed to the ground, it is still part of the city's landscape and remains a haunting presence. It exists in fragments: memories, images, and ghost stories. The short story focuses on the connection between memory, trauma, and storytelling. The space of Muranów, a palimpsest of the past, becomes a trigger for re-examination of what has been forgotten and silenced. Moreover, it explores how a foreign language can serve as a tool through which painful and repressed stories can be (re)told. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vernon Lee considered the conventional ghost story to be in rather bad taste and, in her own Gothic fiction, evoked ghosts that are never directly apprehended, but are perceived as agential bodies nonetheless. The distinctive ghosts that Lee creates haunt by exploiting the mechanisms of perception that she studied and theorised throughout her career. I analyse Lee's depictions of perception in three stories, 'Oke of Okehurst', 'Amour Dure', and 'The Image', through the lens of philosopher Alva Noë's theory of perception as 'a kind of skilful bodily activity'. Noë argues that we make sense of the world by using our sensorimotor knowledge – 'a knowledge of the way sensory stimulation varies as a function of movement'. Lee's ghosts draw on this sensorimotor knowledge of characters and readers, allowing her to convey a potentiality for agency without depicting unambiguously supernatural events. Using mirror neuron studies and cognitive readings of how works of art transport their audiences into virtual environments, I argue that this sensorimotor engagement builds up a cognisance of Lee's haunting figures as agential bodies that occupy space, acted upon by the material world and, in turn, acting upon it. Lee used these ghosts to adopt speculative perspectives on perception and cognition more broadly, such as questioning the stability and reliability of perception, and suggesting a loss of identity involved in all acts of perception. These perspectives are excluded from her studies and essays but are explored in the fictional space that the Gothic opens up; in her gothic stories, Lee exploits the uncanny aspects of cognition, suggesting and experimenting with queerer and more speculative theories than the objective studies she also pursued could accommodate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

C.J. Langenhoven is a central figure in the history of Afrikaans literature. This article specifically focuses on his literary legacy of ghost stories and his contribution to Afrikaans children's literature. A recent reworking of Langenhoven's most beloved ghost stories into a children's book by Wendy Maartens titled Die wandelende geraamte en ander spookstories deur C.J. Langenhoven [The wandering skeleton and other ghost stories by C.J. Langenhoven] combined these two branches of Langenhoven's oeuvre, although it appears that they have never been truly separate. The popularity of ghost stories in children's literature and the opposing fears of adults pertaining to horror literature for children are addressed. Maartens' reworking of Langenhoven's ghost stories, specifically as a children's book, is analysed and compared to the original short stories to determine what her book contributes to the legacy of Langenhoven, and who or what the real wandering skeletons may be in the subgenre of horror in Afrikaans children's literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile methodology has long been adopted in social science as a data collection tool and there is an established industry focused on cemeteries and ghost walks as a novel and appealing way to engage audiences in mortality. However, death studies have rarely sought to embrace mobile methods as an opportunity for innovation in teaching to enhance Higher Education (HE) student learning. This paper will reflect on the value and potential of adapting mobile methods to become mobile learning, an innovative pedagogic approach enabling the teaching of mortality to become an immersive experience of ‘learning on the move’ using mobile technology. Learning on the move has, I will demonstrate, a range of benefits for participants. These include the stimulation of the thanatological imagination and the schooling of participants to communicate effectively and sensitively about death, dying and the dead. I will explore the significance of mobile learning through the York Death and Culture Walk (DaCWalk), an open access self-guided fully podcasted walk through the centre of one of the UK’s oldest cities. The walk is designed to enable HE student walkers to experience embodied learning as they come to both know and understand mortality in a historic urban space. Mobile learning is argued to be a powerful innovation as a pedagogic tool for teaching and learning about death, dying and the dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kamisato Yudai's Immigrant Ghost Stories (2022) evokes past generations that suffered violence yet nevertheless haunt the present as gentle spirits, whether as reincarnated animals, reincarnated people, or repeated patterns of physical gesture and movement. Blurring the borders between fiction and documentary, storytelling and physical theatre, the work stages transnationality as both an economic practice and a sociocultural necessity, encouraging us to acknowledge the heterogeneity of Japanese–Latin American and other Japanese transnational identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the multifaceted cultural history of ghost trains in Victorian fiction by situating three little-known ghost stories in the publishing and social history of the second half of the nineteenth century. The figure of the ghost train offers a route into the entangled history of publishing and railways by contextualising the anxieties presented in railway ghost stories with the real-world experiences of passengers. Taking ideas of mobility as a focal point, this paper brings together discussions of virtual travel and the supernatural to demonstrate some of the impact railways had on reading and writing about train travel. More so than tales of other haunted transport technologies, it is the ghost train's unnatural capacity for movement that disturbs both passengers and readers. By both enhancing and warping reality, railways are ripe source material for Victorian ghost stories to entertain and demand questions of spatio-temporal experience from their reading passengers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This archival piece presents an excerpted translation from the memoirs of Willy Haas, Die Literarische Welt (1958). Haas was a Czech-German writer and scenarist who migrated to Bombay during the Nazi purge of European Jews. The translation, by Xan Holt, offers rich atmospheric and technical details about an underdocumented period in Indian film history. The framing commentary by Debashree Mukherjee goes deeper into the histories coded in the excerpt: of Bhavnani Productions, a studio founded by film director Mohan Bhavnani, and the first film that Haas wrote for him, a controversial adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts, released in India as Jhoothi Sharm (1940). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the placement and displacement of Nahua labor in the architectural history of Mexico's early colonial monasteries. It takes as its point of departure the story of a ghost in the Tlaxcala monastery as told by a Franciscan missionary to analyze the discursive and spatial dimensions of emergent racial ideologies in Mexico's earliest Catholic missions. While the ghost's appearance signals the eruption of unresolved tensions between the missionaries and the Tlaxcalans in a cohabited religious complex, the specter also animates settler colonial domination. Cross-referencing Nahuatl and Franciscan documents reveal the ghost story as a whitewashed tale of monastic ritual life wherein the ghost effaces Indigenous labor at precisely the moments and places missionaries deemed it most threatening. In so doing, this study illuminates how racial ideologies were structured discursively and experientially at the missions and contributes to urgent debates about how the history and preservation of Catholic architecture in Mexico conceals and represses the lived experience of Indigenous peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Recently, the performance of RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) has been significantly improved with the development of deep-learning techniques. However, most of them depend on complex structures with a large amount of parameters and multi-add operations, which need huge computational resources and are not applicable to real-world applications, especially on mobile devices. To handle this problem, we propose a lightweight network, namely LCH, for RGB-D SOD. Specifically, we first design a novel lightweight ghost in ghost (GiG) module to enable a more powerful multi-scale feature extraction, which not only efficiently tackles the scale variations of salient objects but also guarantees a high inference speed. Then, the proposed GiG module works in conjunction with ghost bottlenecks (G-bneck) and, therefore, forms a new lightweight U-Net structure network for fast CPU RGB-D SOD. Furthermore, to enhance the feature discriminability of our LCH, we also design a novel hybrid knowledge distillation approach (HKD), for which both semantic structure information and pixel-wise similarity information are transferred from a powerful state-of-the-art RGB-D SOD network to the proposed LCH model, so as to generate more satisfactory detection results. Compared with previous work, LCH owns 5.6x fewer parameters and achieves 5.4x faster inference speed on the CPU devices, but obtains comparable SOD performance. Extensive experiments are carried out on commonly-used RGB-D SOD datasets. Both qualitative and quantitative results prove the effectiveness of our proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the themes of homecoming and justice in Wagner's opera "Der fliegende Holländer." The author discusses how Wagner's heroes embark on journeys to find their ancestral homes and achieve emotional equilibrium. The article draws parallels between Wagner's heroes and classical figures who also sought homecoming and justice through vengeance. The author suggests that Wagner's personal experiences and fascination with Greek mythology influenced his portrayal of these themes. Another text discusses various aspects of the opera, including its themes of home, redemption, vengeance, and the role of women. It highlights Wagner's progressive views on the power of the feminine and how women ultimately resolve the problems created by men. The text also explores the connection between revenge and reciprocal gift-giving, and how the refusal of a gift symbolizes a turning away from redemption and home. The Bayreuth production by Dmitri Tcherniakov emphasizes the bitterness and horror of the Dutchman's quest for home and the intelligence of the feminine in bringing the drama to its conclusion. The production also links the themes of home and justice with classical mythology and Nordic sagas. Overall, these texts provide a deeper understanding of the opera's themes and the human condition. [Extracted from the article]

The worlds we inhabit tell stories, stitched into the material and symbolic representations of the past that comes to define the features of our places. These stories are never neutral, anchored as they are in the intentional (re)presentation of a racialized white, masculine, and settler story as "our" story. Indeed, space, as an ostensibly neutral platform for storytelling, is called into service of settler-state anxieties to write itself into every (spatial) corner of our lives. This paper takes up this issue by theorizing how the street naming practices of settler communities write into everyday life a settler collective memory that, as a consequence, both shapes space into (settler) place and powerfully intervenes in individual (student) geographic consciousness. By way of vignettes woven throughout theoretical considerations as examples of everyday encounters, I unpack what it means to think of the language of invaded place with greater critical intention as an example of how walking through space can become a pedagogical method, with a focus on detailing what it might mean to support learner engagement with the names that make their communities coherent and media of normalized colonial memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into narrative experiencing acknowledges the role played by mental imagery in readers’ emotional responses and feelings of embodiment. In narratives, mental imagery is frequently evoked through narrated perception, or the textual presentation of sensory perception, as in “The silence in the house was complete”. Narrated perception spans the five senses – sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste; however, little attention has been paid to the narrated description of characters’ basic physiological processes, that is, those connected to the invisible systems – respiratory, digestive, cardio-vascular, muscular – and their relevance to the mental construction of narrative emotions. This study explores the presentation of fictional characters’ physiological processes as a prompt for readers’ embodied experience of storyworlds through the metonymic activation of self-relevant emotion schemata. To this purpose, the presentation of characters’ internal physiological processes in two fictional samples of similar length – Rosemary Timperley’s 1955 ghost story “Harry” and chapter one in Ewan McEwan’s 2002 novel Atonement – is analysed. The findings suggests that these descriptions enrich the imagined nature of narrative emotions through underspecification, and increase opportunities for perceived self-relevance and engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nehruvian era has been seen as marked by the focus on sovereign human agents, no longer dependent on non-humans and their powers to achieve self-defined goals. This reinforced the distinction between humans and their others, notably ghosts and otherworldly creatures. However, this article argues, this exorcism was less successful than often assumed. A close reading of the film Mahal (directed by Kamal Amrohi in 1949) shows that ghosts were not only present at a narrative level, but also continued to establish their presence, right at the centre of the modern medium of the film and amongst filmmakers committed to the Nehruvian project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is at the intersection of Posthuman thought, Gothic narratives, and the New Weird mode where "Two Houses" from Kelly Link's Get in Trouble (2016) can be framed. In the story, six female astronauts alternate years of hibernation and moments of wakefulness in search of a habitable planet. The House of Secrets spaceship is controlled by the AI Maureen. Isolated in space, the astronauts amuse themselves by telling ghost stories. Through the stories, the reader is gradually dislocated from the recognizable landscape of a technologically plausible speculative fiction story to be plunged into a Gothic world of murder, haunted houses, and ghosts. The purpose of this paper is to trace the intersection of Posthuman thought and Gothic characteristics in the story to discuss the slippery relationship between what we believe we are and what we actually are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While certain discussions of trans pronouns refer to third-person "address," for Benveniste, "address" is limited to "I" and "you"; the third person is the "non-person." From Jean-Claude Milner's theory of names and insults and forms of quasi-address that place one above or below the person, the article turns to three other crossings of pro-nominal "person"—psychoanalytic transference (an address to the third person hidden within an I/you address), free-indirect style (a first-person discourse in the third), and certain reversals of person in James's ghost stories—in order to understand the ending of The Ambassadors and Strether's realizations there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the intersections of gender, race, and class, Aparecida emerges as a haunting figure, giving access to that which is marginalized, repressed, trivialized, and denied. The ritual process of popular Catholicism produces a montage effect: Aparecida and the she-wolf. Uncanny similarities between these ghost figures are explored. Following a sequence of performances involving Aparecida in the basilica; the she-wolf in the amusement park; and ladies of Devils'Hole, in their daily dramas; one sees how, as a flashing image, the abject body in performance, even if repressed, becomes meaningful for devotees of Our Lady in critical life-threatening situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article mounts an initial exploratory engagement with the weird fiction of Henry S. Whitehead, framed by American imperial expansion into the Caribbean in the interwar years. It situates Whitehead and his work within the wider historical context and shows how Whitehead himself used and played with history as part of his fiction. The article considers the role of light in Whitehead's fiction and imperial projects, as well as the way that Whitehead's work, as horror fiction, both shapes and seeks to dispel notions of the Caribbean as a space of horror. As well as offering some initial conclusions, the article seeks to open further lines for future investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Ghost Story, written and directed by David Lowery (2017), stands out in the current cinematic landscape due to its use of an innovative narrative structure and an unusual point of view. The film follows the story of a ghost who haunts the house where he lived while he was human, observing the passage of time and the changes occurring around it. The ghost becomes trapped in a temporal drift in which he is forced to watch the same type of events over and over, being unable to move on to another level of existence. Dramaturgically, this loop structure is intended to highlight the human difficulty of overcoming loss and moving forward. I intend to demonstrate that the unique articulation between a point of view free from the temporal contingencies that regulate human experience and a fragmented, anachronistic, and paradoxical narrative organization that breaks the barriers of causality and linearity of conventional narratives suggests a contemporary approach to the conception of time which comes close to Eternalism. Adapting Matthias Brütsch’s taxonomy for this subject, I position David Lowery’s film alongside other loop narratives and explore how the use of such a structure in this case differs from other similar narratives. I delve upon the loop narrative function as defined by Sabine Schenk in Future Narratives (2013), where she advocates for as a broader cultural change in the conceptualization of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter Ackroyd's novels explore encounters with the past in the present of literary creation. Through the figure of the ghost, the usual borders between past and present are crossed as elements or characters from the past resurface in the present. This analysis explores the ways in which Ackroyd's works engage with the past in three singular life narratives. It hovers around two main steps that highlight conversations with the past: the first one considers the textual instances of communication, while the second addresses diegetic components. Through 'transtextuality,' past words and texts are used again in the novels, emphasizing how the ghost of the English canon pervades and invades Ackroyd's works. Through the apparitions of spirits, along with the introduction of all-absorbing places, objects, or bodies of communication, spectral manifestations keep resurfacing in the novels. The ghost of the English literary tradition combined with specters and spirits embody how Ackroyd's life narratives enable conversations with the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the spectralisation of lesbian desire, i.e., the discursive production of the social invisibility of lesbians, through its presentation in two podcasts: Midnight Radio (2018) by Bobbie Parker and Weaver (2021) written and performed by Newton Sweeney. The issue of spectralisation combines uncanny studies with queer theory, developing the concept of the queer subject as a phantom emerging in heteronormative culture through the social repression of queerness (the process known as homo-spectrality). In this context, the podcast format is particularly interesting as a derivative of radio, a medium historically predisposed to telling ghost stories (or conveying the voice of a ghost). The analyzed titles illustrate the social mechanism of spectralisation and offer a significant reinterpretation, as they base the production of the spectre not on the psychological mechanism of repression but on the desire for preservation, maintenance, and love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the historical background and legends surrounding the headless horseman in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." It investigates the claims of Hessian presence in the Tarry Town area during the American Revolution and examines the possibility of a connection between the headless horseman and these troops. The article also discusses the military demographics of German Auxiliary deployment during the Revolution and provides information on the routes taken by captured German soldiers. The author suggests the use of advanced technology to scientifically study the energy field of the headless horseman. The text confirms certain factual aspects of Irving's legend, such as the existence of North Tarry Town (now Sleepy Hollow) and the Old Dutch graveyard, as well as the presence of a wooden bridge mentioned in the story. It also discusses the possible inspiration for the Headless Horseman character, including a reference to a decapitated Hessian in General Heath's Memoirs. The text mentions that some of the characters in the legend were based on real people from the area. The text explores various facts and legends surrounding the story of the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow, including an incident in 1777 where homes were burned and militia officers were targeted. It also mentions the story of Elizabeth Van Tassel running back into her burning house to save her baby, and the alleged burial of a decapitated Hessian soldier by the Van Tassel family. The text discusses the connection between the Headless Horseman and the Hessian soldiers, [Extracted from the article]

This article investigates the spectrality of ekphrases and art reproductions, the haunting presence of the original work's aura and the copyist's self-sacrifice. Focusing on the ekphrastic description of the Baroque painting Beatrice Cenci (1599), earlier attributed to Guido Reni, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860), the article argues that the ekphrastic representation of the copy of the painting embodies the dialectic of enargeia and ekplexis, that is, of the vivifying presence-making of the ekphrasis and its sublime and disturbing absence. In The Marble Faun, the aura of Guido's original painting haunts the copy, made by one of the romance's female protagonists, Hilda, whose art is both creative and imitative. The copy retains the aura of the original but only in the shape of a haunting presence of absence, a ghost, which perpetuates rather than eliminates tradition. Thus, as a paradoxically original imitation of Guido's masterpiece, Hilda's uniquely beautiful copy, whose most salient feature is that is it visibly different from the original, creates an Emersonian unity of beauty and usefulness. Furthermore, the copy is haunted by the copyist's necessary sacrifice of her own individual talent as an artist. The copyist must submit to the genius of the original artist in order to perpetuate the original work's aura, which produces tradition by means of copying and which exists only thanks to the copyist's self-sacrifice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Zuleika, a young black inhabitant of Roman Londinium, and her uncanny relationship with her various homes and homelands in Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe. It also argues that the novel may provoke a sense of the uncanny in the reader, leading them to question traditional views of classical and British history as "all-white". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the rhetoric of nineteenth-century fantastic fiction in order to situate the genre within the intellectual tradition of apophatic, or self-negating, discourse. Through a reading of Fitz-James O'Brien's "What Was It? A Mystery" (1859) and Ambrose Bierce's "The Damned Thing" (1893), two short stories that feature the same kind of supernatural phenomenon (a material ghost), the essay argues that apophasis can be used as a key to understand not only the rhetorical fabric of the fantastic genre but also its tropes and themes and its larger epistemological preoccupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the theme of haunting in the Southern United States, particularly in relation to the presence of ghosts and spirits. It discusses the acceptance of the dead and their influence on daily life in places like New Orleans. The article also examines different perspectives on living with spirits, including the practices of hoodoo and holler magic. It emphasizes the importance of mutual respect and understanding when dealing with haints (spirits) and acknowledges the ongoing impact of past traumas in the South. [Extracted from the article]

The author challenges the notion of southern ghost stories as inherently subversive. Beginning with the stories in late nineteenth-century plantation fiction, this essay explores how wealthy white southerners used the genre to redeem and remake the region's past and present. White authors' claims of fraternity with largely nameless and faceless Black contacts are central to the story and reveal how these ghost stories helped to suppress reality, in favor of mythic tales. A comparison of the planation ghost stories and ghost stories accurately attributed to Black southerners shows that rather than faithfully recording the stories or making room for the oppressed to speak, white writers of planation ghost stories made a mockery of their Black neighbors and denied their post-emancipation agency. The roots of today's southern ghost stories are vastly more diverse, and significantly less empowering, than the celebrated Southern Gothic tales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text is a translated excerpt from a story by Jaros¿aw Iwaszkiewicz, a Polish writer known for his short stories. The story depicts various events that occur within a family and their interactions with their teacher, Mr. Kazimierz. The narrator, a young boy, observes the dynamics and relationships within the family, including a confrontation between Mr. Kazimierz and the boy's sister, Julcia. The story ends tragically with the suicide of the narrator's brother, Felek. The text provides insight into the complex emotions and relationships within the family. [Extracted from the article]

How would the plot of Assassins shift if Squeaky Fromme was singing to Jodie Foster in the song 'Unworthy of Your Love?' Or if Bobbie from Company does not want to get married because her girlfriend, Rifkele, is waiting for her offstage? Marvin Carlson's concept of ghosting explains how an audience's previous experience with a person or object can carry a trace into subsequent roles, which explains how these readings were possible for a certain portion of those watching Erin Markey as Squeaky Fromme in the 2017 City Center Encores! production of Assassins and Katrina Lenk as Bobbie in the 2022 production of Company. Although there was nothing inherently queer about these two characters within their respective Sondheim productions, Markey's performance history and Lenk's well-known role as Manke in Paula Vogel's Indecent ghosted prior performances of queerness onto Markey's Squeaky Fromme and Lenk's Bobbie. This reading provides a way for a queer viewer to find representations of queerness in Assassins and Company that live outside of the gay male experience, which ends up being particularly inclusive for bisexual and lesbian women audience members and performers. By following the author's phenomenological experience of reading these two roles as queer women within their specific musicals, this article posits that spaces for queer women, non-binary people and trans people can and should be explored in the works of Stephen Sondheim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notwithstanding that any allusion to ghosts raises eyebrows, the term congruently evokes metaphysical and existential questions, concepts, and paradigms: death, hauntings, exorcism, healing, and mourning. It may speak to traumatic events—manifested spectrally—that leave an imprint on the psyche. The expression "to lay the ghost to rest" alludes to hauntings and processes of exorcism and healing. This article investigates how these processes condition and define identity politics in the Black and transatlantic world. It taps into contemporary African literature in an attempt not only to map out the literary and social functions of ghosts—as metaphors for historical traumas—and their impact on discursive identity formation but also to probe the role of mourning in healing the haunted. It calls for a critical and sustained evaluation and even denunciation of the historical and traumatic events of slavery and colonialism to avoid a repeat, for the benefit of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximately one million Nationalist (Kuomintang) mainland Chinese and their families retreated to Taiwan in 1949, having lost China to the Communists. Taiwan had recently emerged from Japanese colonization of 1895-1945 with a population mostly of Fujian, Guangdong, and Hakka descent, whose ancestors had migrated across the Taiwan Strait during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911), subduing the indigenous Austronesian peoples. The historical conundrum of Taiwan, thus, culminates in 1949 when Nationalist soldiers arrived with their weapons and young families. Was this flood of military personnel and civilians an occupation force, taking over control from the Japanese Empire and from southern China’s settler-colonizers of aboriginal lands? Were they war refugees? Were they both or something else altogether, awaiting half a century later their proper name? Dubbed by Wu Zhuoliu as Orphan of Asia (1945), Taiwan has long been a convenient waystation for the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, British, Japanese, and even dynastic Chinese colonizers to stop and replenish, or even to settle. Taiwan has been the “founding foundling” fathered and abandoned by these foreign masters, the last one in 1949 claiming to be Taiwan’s biological father. This essay focuses on novels and short stories, personal and historical accounts, and films of that fraught moment when refugees, some with guns, fled to Taiwan for dear life, crushing other lives in their wake. Their settling in unsettled those who had already settled there, a karmic cycle entirely man-made. Specifically, I explore the shared literary motif of laobing (老兵, old soldiers or Nationalist veterans, in the plural or the singular) as pedophiles, perverts, and phantoms. Represented largely by second-generation waishengren (外省人) or mainlander writers, many of these old soldiers or veterans—armed no longer with guns, but fetishized as phantasmagoric phalluses—had relocated to Taiwan without much education and life skills, some of whom even drafted at gunpoint in China, the so-called “snatched soldiers.” One of the most wretched groups in postwar Taiwan without money and family, laobing-cumsexual predators displace the ambivalent subconsciousness of Nationalist refugees with guns and their children, who project their collective trauma and sin onto the scapegoat in their midst. Although deemed strangers ill-adapted to the island, laobing, ironically, embody Taiwan, the orphan ghosts that come in handy as tropes since they can be unhanded anon. Waishengren and Taiwanese writers do unto laobing—the sacrificial lamb straitjacketed in wolf’s clothing—what China and the international community have done unto Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a conversation with Norwegian author Jon Fosse, whose works have been translated and adapted in Romania. Fosse discusses the reinterpretation of myths in different cultural contexts and the blurring of boundaries between the living and the dead in his writing. He also emphasizes the influence of the Nordic landscape on his artistic inspiration and the themes of melancholy and loneliness in his work. Fosse believes that his writing can be understood and appreciated in different cultures, and while he rarely reads translations of his books, he has seen his plays performed in various languages with great understanding. [Extracted from the article]

Corera notes that his book is based on dozens of interviews with intelligence officers in London, Washington, and Moscow, including some who served as illegals. The prevailing narrative, pushed by the media and, according to Corera, inspired by the White House, holds that the illegals were a throwback to the Cold War, an anachronism that is not likely to be replicated. They were unmasked by Aleksandr Poteyev, an SVR officer who had volunteered to the FBI in 1999 while serving under cover in Russia's Permanent Mission to the United Nations. Gordon Corera is the security correspondent for the British Broadcasting Company, where he has established a solid reputation for reporting on American, British, and Russian intelligence. [Extracted from the article]