What Is Anything?

For more than forty years, S. T. Joshi has been a presence in the weird fiction community. In this expansive and elegantly written memoir, Joshi reflects on the major facets of his life. Born in India in 1958, he came with his family to the United States in 1963, settling in the Midwest. He hit his stride in an Indiana high school, where he first read Lovecraft's books from the public library. He was accepted as an undergraduate at Brown University, where he not only learned Greek and Latin but explored the vast resources of the Lovecraft Collection at the John Hay Library. By 1982, Joshi was already recognized as a leading authority on Lovecraft, and his preparation of corrected texts of Lovecraft's fiction for Arkham House helped to launch a revolution in the study of the dreamer from Providence.

In the decades that have followed, Joshi has expanded his range to cover the entire history of weird fiction, as well as such fields as atheism and left-wing politics. Among his nearly 400 books are bibliographies of leading weird writers, monographs, histories and biographies, and even a few works of fiction.

What Is Anything? speaks frankly of Joshi's relations with friends and colleagues (among them Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, Marc Michaud, Robert M. Price, and David E. Schultz), as well as his two wives. This memoir, enlivened with many photographs of Joshi and his friends and family, provides unprecedented insights into the worlds of Lovecraft scholarship and many other related subjects. For this paperback edition, Joshi has added a lively chapter covering the eventful years of 2018-22.