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  Marcel Schwob - A Short Story...

  Marcel Schwob

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  Mayer André Marcel Schwob was born in Chaville, Hauts-de-Seine, France on 23rd August 1867 into a cultivated Jewish family.  
   
  As a child he devoured the works of Poe and Stevenson in French and then again in English.  His attachment to the bizarre and dark was already forming. 
   
  His education at the Lycée of Nantes earned him the 1st Prize for Excellence.  In 1881, he was in Paris with his maternal uncle to study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.  Schwob quickly developed his multilingual abilities and then studied philology and Sanscrit at the École pratique des hautes études before completing his military service in Vannes with the artillery. 
   
  After completing a Bachelor of Arts in 1888 he became a professional journalist and worked for the Phare de la Loire, the Événement and L'Écho de Paris. 
   
  The 1890’s marked his establishment as a brilliant writer with the publication of six short story collections.   
   
  He fell ill in 1896 with a chronic, incurable intestinal disorder.  He also suffered recurring bouts of influenza and pneumonia.  Intestinal surgery was given several times, at first with success but, by 1900, after two more surgeries, he was told that nothing more could be done for him.  Schwob now existed on kefir and fermented milk. 
   
  By the turn of the century, despite failing health, and often too ill to write, he embarked on several long travels, including to Vailima in the South Pacific where his literary hero Stevenson had died.  
   
  Schwob was regarded as a symbolist writer and a ‘precursor of Surrealism’.  He wrote over a hundred short stories, journalistic articles, essays, biographies, literary reviews and analysis, translations and plays.  
   
  Marcel Schwob died on 26th February 1905 of Pneumonia.  He was 37. 
   
  01 - Marcel Schwob - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  02 - Arachne by Marcel Schwob 
  03 - Spiritualism by Marcel Schwob 
  04 - The Mouthless by Marcel Schwob 
  05 - The Opium Gates by Marcel Schwob 
  06 - The Strong by Marcel Schwob

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - Men...

  Guy de Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy,...

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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. 
   
  This decade is resplendent with literature and its many prodigiously talented authors who write on as varied a range of subjects as might be thought possible. Yet each is studded with careful literary precision and narrative verve.  It is a remarkable decade. 
   
  1 - The Top 10 - The 1880's - The Men - An Introduction 
  2 - The Horla by Guy de Maupassant 
  3 - How Much Land Does A Man Need by Leo Tolstoy 
  4 - The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  5 - The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov 
  6 - The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 
  7 - The Canterville Ghost - Part 1 by Oscar Wilde 
  8 - The Canterville Ghost - Part 2 by Oscar Wilde 
  9 - A Horseman in the Sky by Ambrose Bierce 
  10 - The Phantom Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling 
  11 - The Lady, or the Tiger by Frank Stockton 
  12 - The Signal by Vsevolod Garshin

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  Ten Stories by Katherine Mansfield

  Katherine Mansfield

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  Although Katherine Mansfield was born in New Zealand in 1888, she spent much of her short life in England and on the Continent. As she wrote about the privileged worlds she encountered there, her stories quickly attracted literary attention. Prelude was hand-published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press. Readers today still applaud the grace with which Mansfield fuses image, mood and meaning. Here are ten of Katherine Mansfield’s extraordinary tales. The exquisite narration by Jenny Sterlin gracefully captures both their subtle moments and their startling revelations. A whispered phrase, a ring twisting on a finger—each becomes a symbol for the broader emotional forces at work. Included are: The Baron, The Modern Soul, Prelude, At the Bay, Bliss, The Man Without a Temperament, The Daughter of the Late Colonel, The Garden-Party, Miss Brill, and The Doll’s House.

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  Concrete Fields

  David Gaffney

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  The countryside – what is it for? A paradise on earth where you can relax and get creative? Or an outdoor wool factory where every other house is an Airbnb and there are fewer trees than Camden. In his new collection of short stories David Gaffney explores the theme of town versus country through a number of different lenses, including his own experience of being brought up in west Cumbria then moving to Manchester.
  A creative residency on the coast of Scotland becomes weirder and weirder in "The Retreat"; 'I've always had the feeling that the countryside has something against me and that one day it will take its revenge.' In "The Table", a recluse in Penrith uses mid-century furniture to lure city dwellers into a world of 'depressed farmers with shotguns and bottomless pits of slurry that will swallow you so hard you'll never be seen again. And in "The Garages" the pressure of city living forces a man to become oddly obsessed with empty spaces. Often funny, often haunting, often profound, Gaffney uses dark humour and surreal characters to demonstrate a deep understanding of how places, urban or rural, can shape, influence and sometimes distort our lives. 'People who like the countryside tend to believe in things that aren't really there,' says a character in "The Country Pub".
  These are indeed stories about things that aren't really there, and this is why they resonate with you long after you have stopped reading.

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  Where We Go When All We Were Is...

  Sequoia Nagamatsu

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  "You should be here; he's simply magnificent." These are the final words a biologist hears before his Margaret Mead-like wife dies at the hands of Godzilla. The words haunt him as he studies the kaiju (Japan's giant monsters) on an island reserve, attempting to understand the beauty his wife saw. "The Return to Monsterland" opens Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, a collection of twelve fabulist and genre-bending stories inspired by Japanese folklore, historical events, and pop culture. In "Rokurokubi," a man who has the demonic ability to stretch his neck to incredible lengths tries to save a marriage built on secrets. The recently dead find their footing in "The Inn of the Dead's Orientation for Being a Japanese Ghost." In "Girl Zero," a couple navigates the complexities of reviving their deceased daughter via the help of a shapeshifter. And, in the title story, a woman instigates a months-long dancing frenzy in a Tokyo where people don't die but are simply reborn without their memories. Every story in the collection turns to the fantastic, the mysticism of the past, and the absurdities of the future to illuminate the spaces we occupy when we are at our most vulnerable."

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  Mother and Daughter

  D H Lawrence

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  'Mother and Daughter' can be read as one of Lawrence's diatribes against women. Two women do their best to get along without men but in the end, as Lawrence always proposed, a woman cannot be fulfilled without a dominant man, however unsuitable he may be.

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