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  The Best That You Can Do - Stories

  Amina Gautier

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  Winner of the 2023 Soft Skull-Kimbilio Publishing Prize, a collection of short stories that elaborate the realities of a diasporic existence, split identities, and the beautiful potency of meaningful connections 
   
   
   
  Primarily told from the perspective of women and children in the Northeast who are tethered to fathers and families in Puerto Rico, these stories explore the confusion of being one person in two places—of having a mother who wants your father and his language to stay on his island but sends you there because you need to know your family. Loudly and joyfully filled with Cousins, Aunts, Grandparents, and budding romances, these stories are saturated in summer nostalgia, and place listeners at the center of the table to enjoy family traditions and holidays: the resplendent and universal language of survival for displaced or broken families. 
   
   
   
  Refusing to shy away from dysfunction, loss, obligation, or interrogating Black and Latinx heritages, Gautier's stories feature New York neighborhoods made of island nations living with seasonal and perpetual displacement. Like Justin Torres's We the Animals or Quiara Alegria Hudes's My Broken Language, it's the characters-in-becoming—flanked by family and rich with detail—that animate each story with special frequencies, especially for listeners grappling with split-identities themselves.

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  The Altar of the Dead - From...

  Henry James

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  Henry James was born 15th April 1843 in New York City. 
  His youth was spent travelling with his family receiving what was an "extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous" education as they journeyed through London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Newport, Rhode Island, according to the father's current interests and publishing ventures. James studied primarily with tutors and only briefly attended schools.    
  Undoubtedly the quality of his writing has ensured his name is enshrined in the American literary tradition.  
  James was a committed Anglophile and spent most of his adult life as an expatriate in Europe.  Many of his novels juxtapose the Old World with the New World. Classics such as ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, ‘Daisy Miller’ and ‘The Ambassadors’, display the entanglement between American and European cultures and mentalities. They highlight the differences between the two worlds through following the experiences of American expatriates in Europe.  
  A prolific author he was able to easily move across genres to create vivid and totally real worlds and situations and to offer sophisticated observations of human relations as well as realistic, social criticism.  
  As a critic James was unafraid to venture into reviews and essays of those other literary giants around him.  These together with his short stories and, of course, classic novels, make Henry James an author to be not only admired but read, and read often.  
  In 1915 Henry James became a British citizen. 
  On 28th February 1916, at the age of 72, Henry James died in Chelsea, London. 
  He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912 and 1916. He never won.

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  Clairvoyance - From their pens...

  D K Broster

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  Dorothy Kathleen Broster was born on 2nd September 1877 at Devon Lodge in Grassendale Park, Garston, Liverpool. 
  At 16, the family moved to Cheltenham, where she attended Cheltenham Ladies' College and then on to St Hilda’s College, Oxford to read history, where she was one of the first female students, although at this time women were not awarded degrees. 
  Broster served as secretary to Charles Harding Firth, a Professor of History for several years, and collaborated on several of his works. Her first two novels were co-written with a college friend, Gertrude Winifred Taylor. 
  With the Great War interrupting her literary ambitions she served as a Red Cross nurse at a Franco-American hospital, but returned to England with a knee infection in 1916.  
  After the war, she moved near to Battle in East Sussex and took up writing full-time.  
  In 1920 she at last received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from Oxford. 
  Her novels, mainly historical fiction, peaked in popularity with ‘The Flight of the Heron’, in 1925, a best-seller followed up by two sequels. 
  As well as poetry and various articles she also wrote several short stories, the best known of which is a classic of weird fiction ‘The Couching at the Door’ in which an artist appears to be haunted by a mysterious entity. 
  An intensely private individual many readers deduced from her name that she was both a man and Scottish. 
  D K Broster died in Bexhill Hospital on 7th February 1950.  She was 73.

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  For Your Eyes Only - A James...

  Ian Fleming

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  A STUNNING COLLECTION OF STORIES THAT SENDS BOND TO BERMUDA, THE BAHAMAS, AND BEYOND. Narrated by Johnny Flynn! 
   “From a View to a Kill” whisks Bond to the French countryside where he must go undercover to expose a deadly secret-intelligence plot, and in “For Your Eyes Only,” 007 is absorbed into a private vendetta of M’s, blurring the lines between the personal and professional. In “Quantum of Solace,” Bond attends a dinner party in the Bahamas and learns how passion can soon twist into cruelty, while “Risico” forces the secret agent to fight for the lesser of two evils in a smuggling war set amid the Mediterranean. Finally, “The Hildebrand Rarity” lands 007 in an old-fashioned murder mystery at sea, where even he has a secret to keep. 
   A collection of both classic intrigue and intrepid self-examination, For Your Eyes Only packs full, vibrant worlds into five classic tales.

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  The Episode in Room 222 - Short...

  Arnold Bennett

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  Enoch Arnold Bennett was born on the 27th May 1867 in Hanley, one of the six towns that formed the Potteries and that later joined together to become Stoke-On-Trent.  
  After passing entrance examinations for Cambridge University his solicitor father instead decided that he should work for him, unpaid, in his thriving office.  In the evenings the young Bennett wrote or studied and one skill he developed was Pitman’s shorthand which gave him entrance to a position as a clerk at a solicitor’s office in London.  From there followed various jobs but none seemed to be able to ignite his career as a full-time author. 
  By 1903 he had moved to live in Paris; he was 35, unmarried and keen to settle into his new life.  In 1908 he published his first remarkable novel; ‘Clayhanger’, that drew on his earlier life in the Potteries.   
  A prolific writer he was able to deliver very fine works but also write many that were described as ‘potboilers’.  Despite this disclaimer many were lapped up by an audience eager for his prose and helped turn him into the most financially successful author of the times.    
  As the First World War drew to a close, he was appointed to run the Ministry of Information.  During the 1920s he was reputedly the highest paid literary journalist in the land and continued to write novels, plays and short stories.   
  Arnold Bennett died in his flat at Chiltern Court on the 27th March 1931, from typhoid after drinking water in France on his last holiday.  He was 63.

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  Betty Brown the St Giles Orange...

  Hannah More

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  Hannah More was born on February 2nd, 1745 at Fishponds in the parish of Stapleton, near Bristol. She was the fourth of five daughters. 
  The City of Bristol, at that time, was a centre for slave-trading and Hannah would, over time, become one of its staunchest critics.  
  She was keen to learn, possessed a sharp intellect and was assiduous in studying.  Hannah first wrote in 1762 with The Search after Happiness (by the mid-1780s some 10,000 copies had been sold). 
  In 1767 Hannah became engaged to William Turner.  After six years, with no wedding in sight, the engagement was broken off.  Turner then bestowed upon her an annual annuity of £200.  This was enough to meet her needs and set her free to pursue a literary career.   
  Her first play, The Inflexible Captive, was staged at Bath in 1775. The famous David Garrick himself produced her next play, Percy, in 1777 as well as writing both the Prologue and Epilogue for it.  It was a great success when performed at Covent Garden in December of that year.  
  Hannah turned to religious writing with Sacred Dramas in 1782; it rapidly ran through nineteen editions. These and the poems Bas-Bleu and Florio (1786) mark her gradual transition to a more serious and considered view of life. 
  Hannah contributed much to the newly-founded Abolition Society including, in February 1788, her publication of Slavery, a Poem recognised as one of the most important of the abolition period.   
  Her work now became more evangelical.  In the 1790s she wrote several Cheap Repository Tracts which covered moral, religious and political topics and were both for sale or distributed to literate poor people.  The most famous is, perhaps, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, describing a family of incredible frugality and contentment. Two million copies of these were circulated, in one year. 
  In 1789, she purchased a small house at Cowslip Green in Somerset. She was instrumental in setting up twelve schools in the area by 1800. 
  She continued to oppose slavery throughout her life, but at the time of the Abolition Bill of 1807, her health did not permit her to take as active a role in the movement as she had done in the late 1780s, although she maintained a correspondence with Wilberforce and others.  
  In July 1833, the Bill to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire passed in the House of Commons, followed by the House of Lords on August 1st. 
  Hannah More died on September 7th, 1833.

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