Editorial: Salt
'This new short story collection from Clare Fisher explores of feelings of failure around gender, sexuality, and work, that arise in a success-obsessed capitalist culture. Dazzling, playful, and experimental, it veers between the real, the surreal and the absurd.'
This is a short poetic story based on characters from the Magicians series. I am beyond life, I am beyond strife, I am long beyond my last breath, I'm among the angelic host, some call me a ghost, I awoke one day dead or as good as dead, I knew not how it was even possible me being a ghost as I was the king of the grim reapers, so I cannot die in a normal way as this to become a ghost.Ver libro
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was born on 14th February 1855 in what is now Dnipro in the Ukraine, but then part of the Russian Empire. After attending secondary school he studied at the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute. Wars between and on behalf of Empires were a regular feature of the decades then. Garshin volunteered to serve in the Russian army at the beginning of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877. He began as a private in the Balkans campaign and was wounded in action. By the end of the war, in 1878, he had been promoted to officer rank. By now Garshin, having previously published some articles and reviews in newspapers, wished to devote himself to a literary career. The decision made he resigned his army commission. His time as a soldier provided rich experiences for his early stories. His first ‘Four Days’ was related as the interior monologue of a wounded soldier left for dead on the battlefield for four days, face to face with the corpse of a Turkish soldier he had killed, gained him early admiration as an author of note. He wrote perhaps only 20 stories, but their influence was immense, although in these more modern times he is barely remembered and lives in the more prolific shadows of others. His characters are superbly worked into stories that come alive in the intensity and reality of his prose. Garshin’s most well-known story is ‘The Red Flower’, also known as ‘Scarlet Blossom’ and is easily amongst the first rank of stories dealing with mental health issues. Despite early literary success, he himself experienced periodical bouts of mental illness. In one such bout Garshin attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself down the stone stairs leading into his apartment building. Although not immediately fatal, Vsevolod Garshin died as a result of his injuries in a St Petersburg hospital on 5th April 1888. He was 33.Ver libro
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29th January 1860 in Taganrog, on the south coast of Russia. His family life was difficult; his father was strict and over-bearing but his mother was a passionate story-teller, a subject Chekhov warmed to. As he later said; ‘our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother’. At school Chekhov was distinctly average. At 16 his father mis-managed his finances and was declared bankrupt. His family fled to Moscow. Chekhov remained and eked out a living by various means, including writing and selling short sketches to newspapers, to finish his schooling. That completed and with a scholarship to Moscow University obtained he rejoined his family. He was able to help support them by selling satirical sketches and vignettes of Russian lifestyles and gradually obtained further commissions. In 1884, he qualified as a physician and, although it earned him little, he often treated the poor for free, he was fond of saying ‘Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.’ His own health was now an issue as he began to cough up blood, a symptom of tuberculosis. Despite this his writing success enabled him to move the family into more comfortable accommodation. Chekhov wrote over 500 short stories which included many, many classics including ‘The Kiss’ and ‘The Lady with a Dog’. His collection ‘At Dusk’ won him the coveted Pushkin Prize when was only 26. He was also a major playwright beginning with the huge success of ‘Ivanov’ in 1887. In 1892 Chekhov bought a country estate north of Moscow. Here his medical skills and money helped the peasants tackle outbreaks of cholera and bouts of famine. He also built three schools, a fire station and a clinic. It left him with less time for writing but the interactions with real people gained him detailed knowledge about the peasantry and their living conditions for his stories. His most famous work, ‘The Seagull’ was received disastrously at its premiere in St Petersburg. It was later restaged in Moscow to highlight its psychological aspects and was a huge success. It led to ‘Uncle Vanya’, ‘The Three Sisters’ and ‘The Cherry Orchard’. Chekhov suffered a major lung hemorrhage in 1897 while visiting Moscow. A formal diagnosis confirmed tuberculosis and the doctors ordered changes to his lifestyle. Despite a dread of weddings the elusive literary bachelor quietly married the actress Olga Knipper, whom he had met at rehearsals for ‘The Seagull’, on 25th May 1901. By May 1904 with his tuberculosis worsening and death imminent he set off for the German town of Badenweiler writing cheerful, witty letters to his family and assuring them his health was improving. On 15th July 1904 Anton Chekhov died at Badenweiler. He was 44.Ver libro
Jack and Kitty's Valentine's Day Feel-Good Stories: Funny and Heartwarming Short Stories for Couples, Singles... and Everyone in Between! Grab your tissues and chocolate, and get ready to cuddle up with this heartwarming collection of Valentine's Day stories. From the joy of finding "the one" to the deep bond of friendship, these short tales are perfect for couples, singles, and everyone who believes in love. Experience the magic of a 50th wedding anniversary, chuckle at a first date fail, and discover that sometimes, it's not just about living happily ever after, but happily after laughter. Jack and Kitty's Valentine's Day Feel-Good Stories celebrates the power of love in all its forms, making this a sweet treasure for anyone who enjoys uplifting short stories.Ver libro
Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number. Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best. In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words. These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master.Ver libro
William Fryer Harvey AM was born on 14th April 1885 into a wealthy Quaker family in Leeds, West Yorkshire. He was educated at the Quaker Bootham School in Yorkshire and Leighton Park School in Reading before university at Balliol College, Oxford. His health was fragile and he poured his energies into writing short stories and in 1910 published his first collection ‘Midnight House’. In the Great War he was with the Friends' Ambulance Unit and then served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy. There he received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving but lung damage received at that time troubled him for the rest of his life. He continued to write short stories, and even a memoir, but by 1925 ill health had forced his retirement to any outside work. Three years later he published his second collection which contained his macabre classic ‘The Beast with Five fingers’, only one more collection would come from his pen in his lifetime. For many years of his life he now lived in Switzerland with his wife but a yearning to be home saw them come back to England in 1935. W F Harvey died in Letchworth on the 4th June 1937. He was 52.Ver libro
