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  British Short Story The - Volume...

  Percival Gibbon, Radclyffe Hall,...

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  These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves.  Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language. 
   
  Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind.  These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology’s boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles - which as a geographical definition is the UK mainland and the island of Ireland - and wrote in a familiar form of English. 
   
  Whilst Daniel Defoe is the normal starting point we begin a little earlier with Aphra Behn, an equally colourful character as well as an astonishing playwright and poet.  And this is how we begin to differentiate our offering; both in scope, in breadth and in depth.  These islands have raised and nurtured female authors of the highest order and rank and more often than not they have been sidelined or ignored in favour of that other gender which usually gets the plaudits and the royalties. 
   
  Way back when it was almost immoral that a woman should write.  A few pages of verse might be tolerated but anything else brought ridicule and shame.  That seems unfathomable now but centuries ago women really were chattel, with marriage being, as the Victorian author Charlotte Smith boldly stated ‘legal prostitution’.  Some of course did find a way through - Jane Austen, the Brontes and Virginia Woolf but for many others only by changing their names to that of men was it possible to get their book to publication and into a readers hands.  Here we include George Eliot and other examples. 
   
  We add further depth with many stories by authors who were famed and fawned over in their day.  Some wrote only a hidden gem or two before succumbing to poverty and death. There was no second career as a game show guest, reality TV contestant or youtuber. They remain almost forgotten outposts of talent who never prospered despite devoted hours of pen and brain. 
   
  Keeping to a chronological order helps us to highlight how authors through the ages played around with characters and narrative to achieve distinctive results across many scenarios, many styles and many genres. The short story became a sort of literary laboratory, an early disruptor, of how to present and how to appeal to a growing audience as a reflection of social and societal changes.  Was this bound to happen or did a growing population that could read begin to influence rather than just accept? 
   
  Moving through the centuries we gather a groundswell of authors as we hit the Victorian Age - an age of physical mass communication albeit only on an actual printed page.  An audience was offered a multitude of forms: novels (both whole and in serialised form) essays, short stories, poems all in weekly, monthly and quarterly form.  Many of these periodicals were founded or edited by literary behemoths from Dickens and Thackeray through to Jerome K Jerome and, even some female editors including Ethel Colburn Mayne, Alice Meynell and Ella D’Arcy. 
   
  Now authors began to offer a wider, more diverse choice from social activism and justice – and injustice to cutting stories of manners and principles.  From many forms of comedy to mental meltdowns, from science fiction to unrequited heartache.  If you can imagine it an author probably wrote it.  
   
  At the end of the 19th Century bestseller lists and then prizes, such as the Nobel and Pulitzer, helped focus an audience’s attention to a books literary merit and sales worth. Previously coffeehouses, Imperial trade, unscrupulous overseas printers ignoring copyright restrictions, publishers with their book lists as an appendix and the gossip and interchange of polite society had been the main avenues to secure sales and profits.

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  The Murderer - Bulgakov expertly...

  Bulgakov Mikhail

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  Mikhail Bulgakov was born on 15th May 1891 in Kiev, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, into a Russian family.  He was one of seven children. 
   
  In 1901, Bulgakov attended the First Kiev Gymnasium, and developed a keen interest in Russian and European literature, theatre and opera.  After the death of his father in 1907, his mother assumed responsibility for his education.  After graduating Bulgakov entered the Medical Faculty of Kiev University and then took up a post as physician at the Kiev Military Hospital. 
   
  At the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered as a doctor and was sent directly to the front, where he was badly injured at least twice.  To suppress chronic pain, especially in the abdomen, he injected morphine.  It took years to wean himself off. 
   
  He now took up medical posts in various towns and in 1919, he was mobilised by the Ukrainian People's Army and assigned to the Northern Caucasus.  There, he became seriously ill with typhus and barely survived.  
   
  After this illness, Bulgakov abandoned his medicine to pursue writing.  He moved to Vladikavkaz and had two plays staged there with great success.  He wrote too for various newspapers and other outlets, but his critics were many.  And growing. 
   
  When a Moscow's theatre director severely criticised Bulgakov, Stalin personally protected him, saying that a writer of Bulgakov's quality was above ‘party words’ like ‘left’ and ‘right’.   Indeed, it is said that Stalin watched ‘The Days of the Turbins’ at least 15 times. 
   
  It was not to last and by March 1929, Bulgakov's career was ruined when Government censorship stopped publication of any of his work and plays. 
   
  In despair, Bulgakov wrote a personal letter to Stalin.  He requested permission to emigrate.  He received a phone call from the Soviet leader, who asked the writer whether he really desired to leave. He replied that a Russian writer cannot live outside of his homeland.  Stalin thus gave him permission to continue working. In May 1930, he re-joined the theater, as stage director's assistant.  
   
  During the last stressful decade of his life, and in poor health, Bulgakov continued to work on ‘The Master and Margarita’, wrote plays, critical works, stories, and continued translations and dramatisations of novels.  Many of them were not published, others were derided by critics.  
   
  On 10th March 1940, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov died from nephrosclerosis.  He was 48. 
   
  ‘The Master and Margarita’ was not published in any form until the mid-1960’s 
   
  Here Bulgakov relates a story as told by a doctor describing the terrible things that humanity is capable of doing in times of war.

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  The Black and White of It - Stories

  Ann Allen Shockley

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  A magnificent collection of stories that bravely and honestly explore issues of race, class, sex, love, and being lesbian in AmericaAnn Allen Shockley’s work has been widely praised for its honest portrayals of lesbian life, and now the author takes an even closer look at the singular world of women in love. But the stories that make up The Black and White of It address much more than simply the female gay experience: They cast a brilliant light on race issues and prejudice, on the emotional barriers that divide women and men, on the polarizing distinctions of class and culture, and on family as a force for both good and ill.These are powerful stories of love and desire, intolerance and denial. Here, a bright, vivacious young coed attempts to bring light and love back into the sad life of a lonely middle-aged English professor. An ambitious African American congresswoman refuses to admit the truth about her sexuality, thereby jeopardizing her very special—and secret—relationship with her devoted female assistant. Shockley plunges the reader into the eye of the storm when a gay black woman brings her white lover home to meet the family on Thanksgiving.Whether exploring the ugly, deep-seated prejudice living under the surface of an academic lesbian community, relating the antebellum tale of a southern female plantation owner mesmerized by her newly acquired slave girl, or recalling the sweet, sensual awkwardness of a first date, Ann Allen Shockley writes with unabashed truthfulness, poignancy, and insight. Her stories will long be remembered by gay and straight readers alike.

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  Mons Cassecruche's Inspiration

  George Walter Thornbury

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  M. Cassecruche is a French actor, left behind by his theatre troupe in St. Petersburg. It is October, the Russian winter is approaching and he is deep in debt. He wants nothing more than to escape his creditors and flee back to France, but he has only three sous to his name, and the Russian authorities are watching him.Suddenly inspiration strikes him and he devises a cunning, elaborate, and hilarious plan to escape Russia. Not to mention, getting his own back on his unpleasant landlord.

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  Tales from Nightscape

  David Morrell

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  Author David Morrell is a consummate storyteller, investing his tales with passion, sympathy, and narrative drive. From this master of literate, high-adrenaline novels of action comes three suspenseful short stories that will keep listeners guessing: "Front Man" –              An aging screenwriter cast adrift in a youth-oriented Hollywood culture finds a scary way to make it back into the business. "Nothing Will Hurt You" –              A father is obsessed by his daughter's murder and will stop at nothing to avenge her. "Resurrection" –              A son is determined to preserve and care for a father in cryogenic sleep.

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  Where Nothing Sleeps Volume Two...

  Denton Welch

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  The second volume of Denton Welch’s complete collected short works English novelist Denton Welch originally trained as a visual artist, and a painterly perspicacity and talent for human observation are evident in his writing. His close attention to detail renders even the most seemingly mundane trivialities memorable and important. Though he died at the young age of thirty-three, Welch was quite prolific, doing most of his writing while bedridden after a bicycling accident that left him seriously injured. He produced three novels, over seventy-five short stories, and a journal that ran over two hundred fifty thousand words long.   This volume includes “Man in a Garden,” a brief prose piece that recounts the sketching of a friend in a garden, and the poignant “Memories of a Vanished Period,” which takes place at a wedding. Also included is a selection of stories that depart somewhat from Welch’s standard autobiographical style, venturing into the territory of fiction.

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