Julius Greve is a lecturer and research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg, Germany. He is the author of Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature (2018), and of numerous articles on McCarthy, Mark Z. Danielewski, Francois Laruelle, and speculative realism. Greve has co-edited America and the Musical Unconscious (2015), Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (2017), Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds (2017), and Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities (2019). He is currently working on a manuscript on the relation between modern poetics and ventriloquism. Florian Zappe is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Georg-August-University Goettingen, Germany. He is the author of books on William S. Burroughs ('Control Machines' und 'Dispositive' - Eine foucaultsche Analyse der Machtstrukturen im Romanwerk von William S. Burroughs zwischen 1959 und 1968, 2008) and Kathy Acker (Das Zwischen schreiben - Transgression und avantgardistisches Erbe bei Kathy Acker, 2013), as well as the co-editor of the essay collection Surveillance|Society|Culture (2020), and Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities (2019). In addition to that, he has published widely on literary and visual culture. Currently, he is working on a book project on the cultural history of atheism in America.
It's about time that someone took on the task of defining the 'weird'; that deceptively throwaway term that defines so much of what is interesting about popular culture in the US. This excellent collection represents the best of current thinking on the topic. * Dr Kevin Corstorphine, Lecturer in American Literature, University of Hull, UK *