Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
A Sting In The Ale - cover

A Sting In The Ale

Colin Devine

Publisher: Clink Street Publishing

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

Love, Cruelty, Power: the three cornered stool on which the world squats. A Sting in the Ale is not a novel, it is not even an anti-novel but rather an extended meditation in short story and poetic form over the events reimagined of an otherwise uneventful life; the life of every human animal in which plot and plans fall prey to one darn thing after another. Most things were never meant to be - as the poet of lower middle class misery once observed. The modern cult of power has replaced the ancient notion of the Good as the credible measure of a fulfilled and meaningful life. To what pass is the cult of the self and the cult of power and its holyfool handmaidens leading us? Power, Cruelty and Love; the power of love, the love of power and the universal apologia of partners, jilting lovers, politicians and pimps of various persuasions insisting that one has to be cruel in order to be kind. Very often the kindness in the human animal is cruelty in waiting. A Sting in the Ale is a work of art or pornography - only the individual reader can decide.
Available since: 03/16/2023.
Print length: 90 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • Fallen Mangrove - A Jesse McDermitt Novel - cover

    Fallen Mangrove - A Jesse...

    Wayne Stinnett

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A Spanish treasure ship is driven by a hurricane onto the rocky shoreline of Elbow Cay in September of 1566. Few of the crew survive, but they manage to salvage most of the treasure and bury it on the island, leaving a clue to its location in a chest placed in the boughs of a young mangrove tree. Four hundred forty years later, Jesse McDermitt and his friends solve the riddle that was hidden inside a chest found encased in the now-ancient mangrove. 
    When the head of the Miami-based Croatian mob learns about the treasure he goes to great lengths and expense, in an attempt to relieve Jesse and his friends of the riches. A demented, hyper-sexed island woman also wants it for her own, as does a hot-shot Miami attorney and his son, who is married to Jesse's estranged daughter. 
    As the body count grows, will the crew of Gaspar's Revenge find the treasure or become one of the island's statistics?
    Show book
  • Another Freak - From their pens to your ears genius in every story - cover

    Another Freak - From their pens...

    Mary Angela Dickens

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The bookshelves of British literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors.  From these Isles their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure.  Among them is Mary Angela Dickens.
    Show book
  • Canon Alberic's Scrap Book - From their pens to your ears genius in every story - cover

    Canon Alberic's Scrap Book -...

    M R James

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Montague Rhodes James is cited as perhaps the greatest English writer of ghost stories, an opinion few would disagree with. 
    James was born on 1st August 1862 at Goodnestone Parsonage in Kent, where his father was Curate but at age 3 the family went to live at Livermere, near Bury St Edmunds in East Anglia.  
    From early childhood he had a passion for mediaeval books and antiques. He was educated initially as a boarder at Temple Grove School in East Sheen, west London, before gaining a scholarship to Eton and thence Cambridge where he gained a double first, becoming a distinguished linguist and mediaevalist.  
    Before the Great War vacations were usually spent touring Europe absorbing cultures and references for his later writing. 
    A man of enormous knowledge it was said he timed his breakfast egg whilst he completed the Times crossword.  
    Many of his elegant yet terrifying tales were created by discarding the prevailing gothic cliches and placing his characters and narrative in a realistic setting.  Thereby the stories gained atmosphere and menace on a grand scale and he was famed as the originator of the antiquarian ghost story. 
    Although story-telling and writing these 30 or so tales was a hobby, when published their effect transformed the genre and still chill the bones in our more modern times. 
    James was also a medievalist scholar and translator whose work remains highly respected. He was also Provost of Eton College between 1918 and 1936. 
    M R James died on 12th June 1936 at Eton in Buckinghamshire.  He was 73.
    Show book
  • Orbiting Love: A Space-Time Romance - cover

    Orbiting Love: A Space-Time Romance

    Ella Stories

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A renowned, daredevil female astronaut falls in love with a shy, bookish man who runs a small town library. During a mishap on a space mission, she gets stuck in a time loop where every 24 hours she relives her last day on Earth, forcing her to reevaluate her life, ambitions, and the love she left behind. Through heartbreak and revelations, she learns the bittersweet truth of love's power over time.
    Show book
  • Blue & Green - From their pens to your ears genius in every story - cover

    Blue & Green - From their pens...

    Virginia Woolf

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Adeline Virginia Woolf was born on the 25th January 1882 in South Kensington in London. 
    Although lauded as a founder of modernist writing with such classics as ‘Orlando’, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To the Lighthouse’ and, of course, many classic short stories, her background is filled with elements of tragedy that she somehow overcame to become such a revered writer.   Her mother died when she was 13, her half-sister Stella two years later and with it her first of several nervous breakdowns.  Appallingly it was later found that three of her half-brothers had sexually abused her so darkness must have seemed ever present.   
    She began writing professionally at age 20 but her father’s death two years later brought a complete mental collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.  Somehow she found within herself a literary career and with it great innovations in writing; she was a pioneer of “stream of consciousness”.    
    Her tight circle of friends were the founders of the Bloomsbury Group, a movement whose legacy still influences across the arts and society in many way to this day.   
    Whilst the dark periods continued to interrupt her emotional state her rate of work never ceased.  Until, on 28th March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled up its pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse, in Lewes, East Sussex and drowned herself.  Her body was not recovered until the 18th April.  She was 59. 
    She left behind a note which read in part “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again.  I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times.  And I shan't recover this time.  I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate.  So I am doing what seems the best thing to do”.
    Show book
  • Seeking Fortune Elsewhere - Stories - cover

    Seeking Fortune Elsewhere - Stories

    Sindya Bhanoo

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women's lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power—a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winner 
     
     
     
    Traveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart. 
     
     
     
    In "Malliga Homes," selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In "No. 16 Model House Road," a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In "Nature Exchange," a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In "A Life in America," a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students. 
     
     
     
    Sindya Bhanoo's haunting stories show us how immigrants' paths, and the paths of those they leave behind, are never simple. Bhanoo takes us along on their complicated journeys where regret, hope, and triumph appear in disguise.
    Show book