Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  After Twenty years - From their...

  O Henry

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  William Sydney Porter was born on 11th September 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. At age 3 his mother died from tuberculosis. From an early age it was clear Porter had a large appetite for reading as he absorbed the world around him. 
  He first attended at a school run by his aunt before enrolling at the Lindsey Street High School and then worked at his uncle’s drugstore and gained a pharmacists’ license in 1881.  
  A persistent cough took him to Texas in the hope that a change of climate would help his symptoms. He took on various types of work, initially from ranch hand and cook and then as varied as pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began to write, though for now, purely as a hobby. 
  He was a member of several singing and dramatic groups when he met 17 year old Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy Austin family. Despite her mother’s objection owing to Athol’s tuberculosis, they began courting and in July 1887, they eloped and soon married. 
  Athol, impressed by his writing, encouraged him to get them published. A job as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office paid a healthy $100 dollars per month and life was good. 
  But then life turned cruel. His son died a few hours after birth although a daughter, Margaret, came the following year.  His job had to be vacated but another was found at the First National Bank of Austin. The bank operated informally and Porter was careless in keeping the books. He lost that job but began writing for the humourous weekly The Rolling Stone and the Houston Post. Some time later the federal Bank auditors went through his former accounts and he was arrested on charges of embezzlement. 
  Porter fled the day before his trial to Honduras. Holed up for several months he began to write.  Athol had become too ill to travel to meet him and learning that her health was deteriorating he surrendered to the court in February 1897.  Bail was obtained so that he could stay with Athol during her final days.  
  Porter was sentenced to five years at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. His pharmacy qualifications got him the job of night druggist.  His sentence also gave him time to write and publish fourteen short stories. In December 1899 in McClure’s Magazine he published a short story as O Henry.  
  He was released two years early in July 1901, and reunited with Margaret, now 11, in Pittsburgh.  He now began his most prolific period of writing; a short story per week for the New York World, while also publishing works in other magazines.  Eventually over 600 of his short stories were published. 
  Porter was a heavy drinker and in 1908 his health, which had deteriorated for several years, took a dramatic turn for the worse, as did his writing. 
  O Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver complicated by diabetes and an enlarged heart on 5th June 1910.<

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  Crocker's Hole - From their pens...

  R D Blackmore

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  Richard Doddridge Blackmore was born on 7th June, 1825 at Longworth in Berkshire (now part of Oxfordshire), where his father, John Blackmore, was Curate-in-charge of the parish. His mother died a few months after his birth the victim of an outbreak of typhus. With this loss the family moved to Bushey, Hertfordshire, then on to their native Devon.  His elder brother Richard (by a year), however, was taken by his aunt to live near Oxford. His father married again in 1831, whereupon Richard returned to live with them.  With much of his childhood spent in the lush and pastoral "Doone Country" of Exmoor, and along the Badgworthy Water, Blackmore came to love the very countryside he immortalised in Lorna Doone.  In November 1853 he married his wife Lucy.  And the following year, 1854, his literary career began with a collection of Poems and for the next 15 years he would write in the winters and garden in the summers.  In 1860 with inherited money he built a house in Teddington just outside of London and established a market garden for the cultivation of fruit.  He loved horticulture but having little business experience could never really exploit it.  However with the publication of Lorna Doone in 1869 he was catapulted to fame.  And although he continued to write extensively nothing caught the public imagination quite like Lorna Doone.  RD Blackmore died at Teddington on 20th January, 1900 after a long and painful illness, and was buried next to his wife in Teddington cemetery.

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  Pre-Approved for Haunting - And...

  Patrick Barb

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  In this new collection, Patrick Barb explores themes of family found and lost, media consumption and the dangers of runaway nostalgia, the supernatural in our lives, and the impact of violence in both the long- and short-term. -A young couple is reunited with their lost son whose favorite fuzzy bear suit connects him to the ghost of a vengeful mama bear while he's alone in the forest. -A jaded screenwriter can’t escape the haunted screenplay that’s ruined his career. -A man returns to his small hometown, where the people are gone and the trees have taken over. -A Slasher and Final Girl brother-sister duo match wits and blades against a sentient, dimension-hopping apocalypse at a never-ending summer camp. From rural backwoods to Park Slope brownstones, Barb's characters face impossible, awful situations, testing their inner strength and understanding of reality. Covering quiet horror, weird fiction, supernatural horror, slasher horror, topical dark fiction, and more, these stories spotlight supposedly familiar terrors and fears in new and unexpected ways..

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  The Menagerie

  Joshua Whittaker

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  This book is a collection of eight separate stand-alone short stories. These stories will take you on a journey of suspense, adventure, mystery and horror.
   
  
   
  There is something for everyone, whether you like gritty detective stories, mythological adventures or enticing horror, all that and more in this Menagerie.

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack...

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  In this volume the Mad Scientist takes centre stage.  Naturally the stories come in all shapes and sizes and in the pens of our classic authors the scientists more usually arrive as dark, twisted and evil as they go about their work illuminating humanity as only a mad scientist can. 
   
  1 - The Top 10 Short Stories - Mad Scientists - An Introduction 
  2 - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde - Part 1 by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  3 - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde - Part 2  by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  4 - A Thousand Deaths by Jack London 
  5 - A Diagnosis of Death by Ambrose Bierce 
  6 - The Facts In The Case of Monsieur Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe 
  7 - The Mortal Immortal by Mary Shelley 
  8 - Carnivorine by Lucy Hamilton Hooper 
  9 - The Man Without a Body by Edward Page Mitchell 
  10 - Rappaccini's Daughter - Part 1 by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  11 - Rappaccini's Daughter - Part 2 by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  12 - The Blue Laboratory by L T Meade 
  13 - Herbert West - Reanimator - Part 1 by H P Lovecraft 
  14 - Herbert West - Reanimator - Part 2 by H P Lovecraft

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  Prospector's Special

  Robert Sheckley

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  In the scorching sands of Venus’s Scorpion Desert, one man’s dream of striking it rich becomes a desperate fight for survival. “Prospector’s Special” by Robert Sheckley is a gripping sci-fi adventure that blends biting satire with raw human determination. When Tom Morrison’s sandcar fails and his supplies dwindle, he must face Venus’s deadly terrain—and his own ambition—armed with nothing but grit and a bizarre robotic mailman. A tense, ironic, and ultimately thought-provoking tale of fortune, failure, and what really matters in the end.

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