Writers are supposed to have a hard time killing their darlings, but there are a few who apparently thrill to the task. In “Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward ...

Many years ago I saw an obituary notice in the local gay newspaper. Above a desolate, elegantly hand-drawn landscape ran the motto: “Last night it did not seem as if today it would be raining.” And ...

While well-researched biographies typically depend on people who knew and were close to the subject, Mark Dery uses these interviews and quotes differently in this first-ever biography of screenwriter ...

Edward Gorey (1925-2000), the author and illustrator of more than 100 droll, disquieting little picture books, guarded his inner life closely. “Part of me is genuinely eccentric, part of me is a bit ...

Even if you don't know his name, you're probably familiar with the work of Edward Gorey. His art formed the basis of the animated introduction to the PBS show Mystery!, and he was the twisted mind ...

Gorey had a deceptively simple theory of art: the effects, large and small, of pictures and stories are a matter of leaving things out. In 1965 I became a New Yorker, transplanted there, like Gorey, ...

Edward Gorey’s modern Gothic world is as eerie as it is instantly recognizable: Grim, house-coated patriarchs; wilting, kohl-eyed flappers; fainting hostesses and hapless tots; figures posed ...

As a smelly little boarding-school boy, I could have done with some Edward Gorey. His lunar campness, his toys-in-the-attic surrealism, his easy way with cruelty, and his remote compassion, coldly and ...

In the early 1980s, I bartended at an Edward Gorey exhibit at New York’s Gotham Book Mart, serving some of the foulest red wine known to humankind. Somehow people managed to drink it. (One repeat ...