Smith & Taylor Classics is an imprint of Unnamed Press, founded in 2024, combining Unnamed’s mission to uplift the unlikely and unexpected from around the world with editors Allison Miriam Smith and Brandon Taylor’s shared love of craftsmanship and classic literature. Featuring both celebrated and lesser-known authors from the past, S&T seeks to reintroduce titles that pushed the boundaries of their time, and whose themes continue to resonate today. Each edition features a conversational afterword between two esteemed readers: established writers, critics, satirists, academics, scientists and more. 

Vernon Lee – Hauntings

“My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts, of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own…”

Shipwrecked before a remote Italian coastal village, a young girl discovers the ability to command love and incite madness; a Polish historian is drawn to the enigmatic allure of a medieval Duchess with a deadly past; a painter, hired to capture the likeness of a reclusive couple, slowly uncovers a mysterious love affair; and a man with a voice that is as deadly as it is beautiful eats away at the health of those who hear him sing, troubling a composer years later. Once described by Henry James as being “as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent,” Vernon Lee’s ghost stories haunt as much as they reveal an obsession with art, architecture, and deadly, queer desires. Even the smallest vibration from the past signals danger for the characters in Hauntings: from the emanations of old houses and old books to the discovery of old portraits, objects come alive and worm into the minds of the living.

Vernon Lee (1856-1935)—the pen name of the writer Violet Paget—was a travel writer, novelist, musician, and critic. Primarily remembered today for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics, she spent most of her life in Florence, Italy, where she cultivated friendships with artists such as Telemaco Signorini, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. One of the first to bring the concept of Einfühlung, or empathy, into English criticism, she was an outspoken follower of Walter Pater’s aestheticism and vocal pacifist until her death in 1935.

In conversation with

Gretchen Felker-Martin is a Massachusetts-based bestselling horror author and film critic. Her debut novel, Manhunt, was named the #1 Best Book of 2022 by Vulture, and was one of the Best Horror Novels of 2022 by Esquire, Library Journal, and Paste. Her sophomore novel, Cuckoo, debuted on the USA Today bestseller list. You can read her fiction and film criticism on Patreon and in TIME, The Outline, Nylon, and more.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. Her queer horror novelette Helen House was named one of the Best LGBTQ Books of 2022 by NBC News. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle, an assistant fiction editor at Foglifter, and the former managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and others. Some of her culture writing can be found in The Cut, The A.V. Club, Vulture, Refinery29, and Vice, and she previously worked as a restaurant reporter for Eater NY. She was a 2023-2024 Tin House Reading Fellow and a 2023 Lambda writer in residence. She is featured in the Dzanc Books anthology Be Gay, Do Crimes.

Bob Proehl – A Hundred Thousand Worlds

Bob Proehl’s career history is not easy to identify because he writes with apparent expertise on relationships, comic book conventions, monsters, time travelers, and  even robots in his debut novel A Hundred Thousand Worlds. It turns out the native of Buffalo, New York, worked as a bookseller, a DJ, a record store owner, and a bartender. Occupations he clearly recalled for his witty, charming book about a mother and son as they travel from New York to Los Angeles, attending comic book conventions along the way. A Hundred Thousand Worlds. is a story about fandom and creativity, but it’s also about the complicated love between a mother and son, and how the stories we tell each other come to shape us, even as we shape them. Proehl’s book is in equal parts a great American road-trip narrative and coming-of-age novel. A magical place where fiction becomes reality.