Literary Collections

Amid a recent resurgence in horror films, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows stands out as a particularly bold entry, a horror fan’s dream come true that sparked a renewed creativity. Pulling a robust 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, It Follows was hailed as a “teen movie you’ve never seen before,” a “creepy, mesmerizing exercise in minimalist horror,” “the best horror film in years,” and simply, “so damn good.” Mitchell uses a variety of approaches to reinvent genre bromides while simultaneously embracing and challenging tropes audiences and filmmakers rely on a little too heavily. It Follows is one of the best because it is one of the most unique. In this Devil’s Advocate, Joshua Grimm focuses on how this film helped reinvent the rules of a horror movie, particularly along the lines of genre, style, sex, and gender.

The Plurality of Realities contains four texts by Leon Chwistek that deal with his original philosophical conception called the theory of plurality of realities. This collection is essential not only for understanding the full-fledged version of Chwistek’s conception but also for surveying its development over a span of five years (1916–1921). Reading these essays in chronological order allows us to notice all stages of its development, beginning with its first sketches, drawn in the book Meaning and Reality, where only two realities are considered, and finishing with Chwistek’s most famous essay, The Plurality of Realities, in which he discusses four different realities: the reality of things, the reality of physics, the reality of impressions, and the reality of imaginations. The collection is preceded by two introductory essays by Karol Chrobak. The first presents Leon Chwistek against the background of the intellectual, cultural, and political life of the interwar period in Poland. The second focuses on Chwistek’s conception of the plurality of realities and gives a critical account of its most widespread interpretations.