mlle ghoul's fairy tales from the shadows

Two weeks until my new book is out, so I reckon it’s time for another “meet the author” post!

I’m S. Elizabeth, and I write books about the stranger, dreaming underside of art. The Art of the Unknown is my fourth offering in The Art In The Margins series.

It’s a treasury of the esoteric, the uncanny, and the unexplained. Nearly two hundred works gathered across centuries and continents, from the vertiginous angst of Léon Spilliaert to the surrealist gloom of Odilon Redon, from the burning prophecies of William Blake to the medieval radiance of Hildegard von Bingen, from Leonor Fini’s regal sorceresses to Ithell Colquhoun’s occult alchemy, from the witching dark of Francisco Goya to the dusk-blue fairylands of Edward Robert Hughes.

The book moves in four parts, drifting from the vast forces out beyond us toward the stranger mystery folded inside us. Cosmic mysteries and hidden watchers, liminal spaces and parallel worlds, restless spirits and forgotten knowledge, and the strange current of the body itself.

Underneath all of it is one small hunch of mine. That every good mystery begins the second someone is brave enough to say “I don’t know.” We tend to treat those words like a wall. I think they’re a door left ajar, with all the strange and marvelous things pooling in the light on the other side.

There’s also a small ritual I fold into every book. Somewhere in these pages is an image that drifted the internet for years labeled “artist unknown,” now printed with its maker’s name given back, so it can never be lost again.

Stay curious...

...and may you never find all the answers!

Just a wee reminder that The Art of the Unknown is nearly here. And we're rewarding the curious first!

 Do You Recognize Any Of These Contemporary Artists In The Art Of The Unknown? – Unquiet Things 

 Do You Recognize Any Of These Contemporary Artists In The Art Of The Unknown? – Unquiet Things 

Do You Recognize Any Of These Contemporary Artists In The Art Of The Unknown? – Unquiet Things

Do You Recognize Any Of These Contemporary Artists In The Art Of The Unknown? – Unquiet Things

 Do You Recognize Any Of These Contemporary Artists In The Art Of The Unknown? – Unquiet Things 

Do You Recognize Any Of These Contemporary Artists In The Art Of The Unknown? – Unquiet Things

Do You Recognize Any Of These Contemporary Artists In The Art Of The Unknown? – Unquiet Things

Do You Recognize Any Of These Contemporary Artists In The Art Of The Unknown? – Unquiet Things

A Book That Was Not To Be: The Art Of The Weird – Unquiet Things

A Book That Was Not To Be: The Art Of The Weird – Unquiet Things

A Book That Was Not To Be: The Art Of The Weird – Unquiet Things

A Book That Was Not To Be: The Art Of The Weird – Unquiet Things