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  The Diary of a God - From their...

  Barry Pain

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  Barry Eric Odell Pain was born at 3 Sydney Street in Cambridge on 28th September 1864. He was one of 4 children. 
  He was educated at Sedbergh School and then Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he read classics and contributed to and edited Granta. 
  Four years of service as an Army coach followed before he moved to London. In 1889, Cornhill Magazine published his short story ‘The Hundred Gates’.  This opened the way for Pain to advance his literary career on several fronts. He became a contributor to Punch and The Speaker, as well as joining the staff of both the Daily Chronicle and Black and White.  
  In 1897 he succeeded Jerome K Jerome as editor of To-Day but still contributed regularly, until 1928, to the Windsor Magazine. 
  It is often said that Pain was discovered by Robert Louis Stevenson, who compared his work to that of Guy de Maupassant.  It’s an apt comparison. Pain was also a master of disturbing prose but able to inject parody and light comedy into many of his works.  A simple premise could in his hands suddenly expand into a world very real but somehow emotionally fraught and on the very edge of darkness as many of these short stories demonstrate.   
  Despite applying his talents to several genres and forms today Pain is more readily thought of, especially during the first decade of the 20th Century, as perhaps the leading British humorist of his day.  These stories reveal a darker side and beg to differ. 
  Barry Pain died on 5th May 1928 in Bushey, Hertfordshire.

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  Leonid Andreyev - A Short Story...

  Leonid Andreyev

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  Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was born on 21st August in Oryol, Russia to a middle-class family of Polish, Ukranian and Finnish ancestry. 
   
  He studied law in Moscow before working as a police-court reporter for a daily newspaper.  His literary efforts at this time were confined to poetry and those he did try to get published were all rejected.  
   
  In 1898 his first short story ‘Bargamot and Garaska’, published in the ‘Kurier’ newspaper caught the attention and friendship of Maxim Gorky.  Andreyev now discarded any other career path apart from that of author. 
   
  His first collection of short stories appeared in 1901 and sold over a quarter of a million copies.  He was a sensation. Using his interest in psychology and psychiatry gave him an almost unrivalled ability to delve into the human psyche and create astonishing characters. 
   
  During the first Russian revolution Andreyev was a staunch defender of democratic ideals and many of his stories reflected the heated mood of the times. With the 1905 Revolution’s failure his work became pessimistic and despairing. By the beginning of the following decade he began losing his audience to new literary movements such as the Futurists. 
   
  He published little after 1914 except political writings, instead working as the literary editor of the ‘Russian Will’ newspaper.  When the Bolsheviks took power he sensed catastrophe was coming and moved to Finland where he spent his last years in poverty distraught at the outcome of the Revolution. 
   
  Leonid Andreyev died of heart failure on 12th September 1919 at the age of 48 in Mustamäki, Finland.

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  Always & Forever

  Kimberly Thomas

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  Erin had a plan . . . Go to college, become an advertising exec, marry her boyfriend of five years, and start a family—all in that order. 
   
   
   
  But even the best laid plans are no match for life's curveballs. Plagued by deception, rejection, and an unfortunate diagnosis, she runs away from the only life she's ever known to forge a new one. But like they say, the past always finds a way to catch up, and after suffering from panic attacks she is forced to step back into her old life as she recuperates. 
   
   
   
  Back in Oak Harbor with her family, Erin is forced to deal with the reason she distanced herself from them in the first place and when the two people she has been trying to avoid the most show up in the beautiful coastal town, she cannot escape the decisions she has to make that will either heal her wounds or break her into a million pieces. 
   
   
   
  Marg has been happy and thriving in her relationship with Ben. The only problem is going after the one thing she's always desired may prove to be more than Ben can handle. When her mother comes to stay with her, Marg finds herself in unfamiliar territory as she tries to navigate their new relationship.

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  The Blind Accordionist

  C.D. Rose

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  In the novel Who's Who When Everyone Is Someone Else, the character "C. D. Rose" (not to be confused with the author C. D. Rose) searches an unnamed middle-European city for the long-lost manuscript of a little-known writer named Maxim Guyavitch. That search was fruitless, but in The Blind Accordionist, "C. D. Rose" has found the manuscript—nine sparkling, fable-like short stories—and he presents them here with an (hilarious) introduction explaining the discovery, and an afterword providing (hilarious) critical commentary on the stories, and what they might reveal about the mysterious Guyavitch. 
   
   
   
  The Blind Accordionist is another masterful book of world-making by the real C. D. Rose, absorbing in its mix of intelligence and light-heartedness, and its ultimate celebration of literature itself. It is the third novel in the series about "C. D. Rose," although the reader does not need to have read the previous two books. (The first in the series was The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure; the second was Who's Who When Everyone Is Someone Else.) 
   
   
   
  Like those books, The Blind Accordionist can be read both as a simple but wonderful collection of quirky stories, and as comedy—or as a beautiful and moving elegy on the nobility of writers wanting to be read.

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  Licensed Premises

  Neil Campbell

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  'Nobody believes what they see on TV, so they want to look for something else, an alternate reality, or a conspiracy theory, and it's interesting to explore it, Twitter is fucking full of it, especially now. It's no wonder people round here are into it, but you don't have to read all that shit, just have some mushrooms and wander round Lidl off your tits.'
  In these fourteen northern tales, Campbell takes us from the edgelands of Manchester to the cloistered villages of The Peak District, Northumberland and Scotland, and illuminates the lives of outsiders, misfits, loners and malcontents with an eye for the darkly comic. A wild-eyed man disturbs the banter in a genial bookshop. A fraught woman seeks to flee a collapsing reservoir. A failed academic finds solace in a crime writer's favourite pub. A transit van killer stalks a railway footpath. A poet accused of plagiarism finds his life falling apart.

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  The Date - A short crime fiction...

  Rachel Amphlett

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  Lucy and Michael keep a regular lunch date, but their rendezvous hides a twisted secret that neither wants to share… 
   
  The Date forms part of the Case Files series of short crime stories from USA Today bestselling author Rachel Amphlett. 
   
  Listen to the Case Files: short crime fiction stories podcast on all major streaming services. Find out more at shortcrimestories.com.

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