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  British Short Story The - Volume...

  Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Mary...

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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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  Where Love Is God Is - Classic...

  Leo Tolstoy

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  Martin is an old cobbler with a good trade, but has had a hard life. His soul is now embittered against God. When he hears a mysterious voice calling him in the middle of the night, his soul seems to lighten and awake to answer the call.

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  Monstress - Stories

  Lysley Tenorio

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  A luminous collection of heartbreaking, startling, and gloriously unique stories set amongst the Filipino communities of California and the Philippines—now with a new preface by the author   
  Monstress stands as a landmark of American multicultural short fiction. Lysley Tenorio’s tales are framed by tense, fascinating dichotomies: tenderness and power, the fantastical and the realistic, pop culture and high culture, the American and the Filipino. Tenorio balances these opposites with rare skill, humor, and deep understanding, exploring universal themes—the sometimes-suffocating ties of family, the melancholy of isolation, the need to find connections—with uncommon empathy and breathtaking originality.

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  Notes From The Underground

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

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  Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man's essentially irrational nature.

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  Dark Tide Rising

  David M. Salkin

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  Underwater horror rises to the surface in this science fiction thriller from the author “who knows the details of deep-sea exploration firsthand” (Ben Bova, Hugo Award-wining author). 
   
  A Japanese fishing trawler becomes a ghost ship. 
   
  A pleasure yacht is under attack by unknown sea creatures. 
   
  A Coast Guard crew is massacred by something not of this world. 
   
  Ted Bell had only one personal goal—to reach Mars. He believed that harnessing the power of the deep-sea bacteria that allows creatures to live in super-heated, poisonous water might get humans to deep space. But when Ted intentionally infected a member of the crew for his own agenda, it didn’t go as planned. A new life form was created–completely out of control. Ted’s failed experiment doomed the crew of the USS Challenger. 
   
  After living through the terrifying disaster that killed half the crew, three survivors think they have escaped the nightmare. Instead, the creatures have risen from the depths—and the three discover that the horrifying experience on the Challenger was only the beginning. 
   
  Praise for Deep Black Sea 
   
  “Spine-tingling terror . . . An exciting read!” —Ben Bova, Hugo Award-winning author 
   
  “Crichton at his best is the main author who comes to mind as a comparable influence when reading Deep Black Sea . . . The informative and fascinating science that fills each page really elevates this book to a higher grade.” —Horror Novel Reviews

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  Blood Sweat and Flame - A Short...

  J.F. Penn

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  Is victory worth blood, sweat, and flame? 
  Cass blows glass for a living — but when she’s not cranking out tourist pieces to pay the bills, she creates unique glass art with the dream of winning a prestigious award that might just change her life. 
  But Cass has a problem. 
  The heat and intensity of the glassblowing hot shop have damaged her eyesight — and time is running out. 
  She only has one chance left to win and a rival artisan stands in her way, the trophies on his shelf testament to his enduring popularity. 
  When his son comes to work alongside Cass, she must make a choice that will change their lives. 
  A choice that will cost Blood, Sweat, and Flame.

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