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To celebrate the ‘Museums at Night’ events taking place this weekend, We’ve asked writer and ‘mythogeographer’ Phil Smith (otherwise known as Crab-man) to ‘curate’ the night for us. As he walks the neon lit suburbs, even the bollards become strange and seem ‘arriviste’. Phil’s latest book is ‘On Walking’ (Triarchy Press).

Sara Maitland celebrates the ‘genius’ of Nathanial Hawthorne’s short stories, and explores their ‘forecasting’ potential, arguing that his work prefigures magical realism. Her extended essay on Hawthorne appears in ‘Morphologies’ (Comma Press), who have also just published Sara’s selection of his best short stories.

The Asia editor of The Times, Richard Lloyd Parry shares his account of the ghost stories told after the Japanese Tsunami in 2011. He explains how these tales of supernatural possession have come to inform his understanding of Japanese attitudes to death and the cult of the ancestors. 

Text-poet and curator Tony Trehy runs the Bury Text Festival. This year the festival features an exhibition on ‘The Language of Lists. Amongst other lists, Tony has kept track of every cultural experience he has had since 1996. He believes our love of lists is to do with our desire to impose order on chaos, and our fear of forgetting.