“I Want You To Love Yourself Enough Not To Feed Yourself Dry Sandwiches For Dinner, Or Skip Eating

This is a compiled list of some of my favorite pieces of short horror fiction, ranging from classics to modern-day horror, and includes links to where the full story can be read for free. Please be aware that any of these stories may contain subject matter you find disturbing, offensive, or otherwise distressing. Exercise caution when reading. Image art is from Scarecrow: Year One.

PSYCHOLOGICAL: tense, dread-inducing horror that preys upon the human psyche and aims to frighten on a mental or emotional level. 

“The Frolic” by Thomas Ligotti, 1989

“Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, 1970

“89.1 FM” by Jimmy Juliano, 2015

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892

“Death at 421 Stockholm Street“ by C.K. Walker, 2016

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973

“An Empty Prison” by Matt Dymerski, 2018

“A Suspicious Gift” by Algernon Blackwood, 1906

CURSED: stories concerning characters afflicted with a curse, either by procuring a plagued object or as punishment for their own nefarious actions.

“How Spoilers Bleed” by Clive Barker, 1991

“A Warning to the Curious” by M.R. James, 1925

“each thing i show you is a piece of my death” by Stephen J. Barringer and Gemma Files, 2010

“The Road Virus Heads North” by Stephen King, 1999

“Ring Once for Death” by Robert Arthur, 1954

“The Mary Hillenbrand Cassette“ by Jimmy Juliano, 2016

“The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs, 1902

MONSTERS: tales of ghouls, creeps, and everything in between.

“The Curse of Yig” by H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop, 1929 

“The Oddkids” by S.M. Piper, 2015

“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” by Richard Matheson

“The Graveyard Rats” by Henry Kuttner, 1936

“Tall Man” by C.K. Walker, 2016 

“The Quest for Blank Claveringi“ by Patricia Highsmith, 1967

“The Showers” by Dylan Sindelar, 2012

CLASSICS: terrifying fiction written by innovators of literary horror. 

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

“The Interlopers” by Saki, 1919 

“The Statement of Randolph Carter“ by H.P. Lovecraft, 1920

“The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Pierce, 1893

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving, 1820 

“August Heat” by W.F. Harvey, 1910

“The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

SUPERNATURAL: stories varying from spooky to sober, featuring lurking specters, wandering souls, and those haunted by ghosts and grief. 

“Nora’s Visitor” by Russell R. James, 2011

“The Pale Man” by Julius Long, 1934

“A Collapse of Horses” by Brian Evenson, 2013

“The Jigsaw Puzzle” by J.B. Stamper, 1977 

“The Mayor Will Make A Brief Statement and then Take Questions” by David Nickle, 2013

“The Night Wire” by H.F. Arnold, 1926 

“Postcards from Natalie” by Carrie Laben, 2016

UNSETTLING: fiction that explores particularly disturbing topics, such as mutilation, violence, and body horror. Not recommended for readers who may be offended or upset by graphic content.  

“Survivor Type” by Stephen King, 1982

“I’m On My Deathbed So I’m Coming Clean…” by M.J. Pack, 2018

“In the Hills, the Cities” by Clive Barker, 1984

“The New Fish” by T.W. Grim, 2013

“The Screwfly Solution” by Racoona Sheldon, 1977

“In the Darkness of the Fields” by Ho_Jun, 2015 

“The October Game” by Ray Bradbury, 1948

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, 1967 

HAPPY READING, HORROR FANS!

😂

LOOL XD

These two are going to kill me 

Some of my doodles

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

–––– –– he used to smile

wi-fi translation in different countries

english = wi-fi

spanish = wi-fi

italian = wi-fi

french = wi-fi

polish = wi-fi

turkish = wi-fi

irish = wi-fi

danish = wi-fi

finnish = wi-fi

swedish = wi-fi

norwegian = wi-fi

czech = wi-fi

albanian = wi-fi

portuguese = wi-fi

azerbaijani = wi-fi

every place on earth = wi-fi

germany = wlan

YES THATS RIGHT WHEN I HAVE IT CHANGED THE KEYBOARD I GET CONFUSED!

(Submitted by anonym)