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  Great Opportunities - How a...

  Marty Friedman

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  I was a boy who started with nothing and finished with more than I ever wished for. I want to inspire others to do the same and to learn from my experiences. 
  As a young man, I always questioned if I'd be able to make my mark in the world because I didn't have the smarts or grades that most of my classmates had. I wasn't a good athlete which is what counts in grammar and high school, and my parents didn't have a lot of money. I did understand though that if I didn't do it for myself, there was nobody else to do it for me. 
  Today, I consider myself the luckiest person in the world. I am 96 years old. 
  I have a wonderful, loving family even though 10 years ago I lost my very special and supportive wife. I have two great sons, two wonderful daughters-in-law, and five smart grandchildren. 
  After 70 years in the TV & appliance business, I am still active in our family business and still love it. 
  I believe this statement: "If you do what you do, and love what you do, you shouldn't call it work."

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  The Irish Goodbye - Micro-Memoirs

  Beth Ann Fennelly

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  A new, genre–defying volume that explores family, marriage, motherhood, place, and coming of age with singular wit and emotional clarity. 
   
  What can we learn from an ordinary life observed with extraordinary skill? In The Irish Goodbye, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of the small moments that shape a life, whether moving or perplexing or troubling or gladdening, in the process dignifying the diminutive through the act of attention. Fennelly explores her roles as a friend, wife, mother, and daughter, documenting a brush with an old flame or the devastating death of her sister in crystalline, precise sentences. 
   
  The longer essays concern Fennelly’s relationships―with a beloved mother-in-law, a decades-long friendship between five former college roommates, an artist who paints a series of nude portraits in Fennelly’s town, for which she poses. Interspersed between these longer memoirs are sections of flash nonfiction, a form Fennelly innovated in the genre-defying Heating & Cooling. With dazzling verve and wit, they capture the interstitial interactions―encounters with strangers, quirky observations, unexpected flights of fancy―that make up a richly lived life. 
   
  The Irish Goodbye offers a rare pleasure: intimacy. With emotional clarity and nimble prose, Fennelly invites readers to share her affirming worldview―one in which even our smallest interactions are rife with possibility.

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  Into the Inferno - The Story of...

  Bill Ibelle

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  The temperature was forty degrees below zero when fighter planes screamed out of the clouds, puncturing the fuselage with a spray of machinegun fire and sending the bomber beside them into a death spin. This was followed by intense flak, as a hundred cannons on the ground tried to blow them out of the sky.When they finally made it back to the base, another enemy awaited them: homesickness, crushing boredom, relentless cold, and more mud than they could imagine.Bert Ibelle was a nineteen-year-old freshman at Dartmouth College when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps to fly dozens of bomber missions over Nazi-occupied Europe and win the Purple Heart. His buddy, Fran Brighenti, served as an infantry marksman on the opposite side of the globe, slogging through the steaming jungles of the Philippine and the fiery hell of Okinawa.Their wars couldn't have been more different, nor could their approach to life. While the ever-exuberant Fran was a ladies man, Bert only had eyes for ""Red," the girl back home who was in love with another young man.This is their story—one that combines terror, humor, friendship, and a son's search for his elusive father.

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  A Slav Soul - From their pens to...

  Alexander Kuprin

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  Alexander Kuprin was born in Narovchat, Penza in Russia on 7th September 1870. 
  At 3 his Father died and he and mother moved to Moscow. By 10 he was enrolled at the Second Moscow Military High School and there his interest in literature began. The Alexander Military Academy followed and two years later he was a sub-lieutenant and posted to an Infantry Regiment for a further four years. 
  Despite his duties he was a now a keen writer and published his first short story at this time. His military duties also garnered him experiences for his breakthrough work ‘The Duel’.  Leaving the military he left for Kiev to work for local newspapers.  He continued to publish both stories and novels and by 1901 he was in St Petersburg becoming part of a group that included Chekhov, Ivan Bunin, Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreyev.  
  In the years that followed further controversial works and acclaim followed.  His comments on the regime meant he was also put under secret police surveillance.   
  As World War I erupted, Kuprin opened a military hospital but was then given command of an infantry company in Finland. He was soon discharged on grounds of ill health.  
  The October Revolution saw him praise Lenin, but he warned that the Bolsheviks threatened Russian culture and might cause further widespread suffering to the peasants.  As Civil War raged he took his family to Helsinki and then on to Paris. 
  Exile saw his talents decline further and his succumbing to alcoholism. He became lonely and withdrawn. The family's poverty increased his malaise.   
  In May 1937, the Kuprin’s returned to Moscow.  He now saw his work published but wrote almost nothing new.  In 1938 his health rapidly deteriorated.  Already suffering from a kidney problems and sclerosis, he had now developed cancer of the oesophagus.  
  Alexander Kuprin died on 25th August 1938.

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  The Top 10 Short Stories – The...

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles...

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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 these Isles of Imperial Empire the English language is now the lingua franca of the globe.  But between the Home nations tensions remain, they rise and fall, all is not well.  Authors born abroad and returning have new views, unique, a little off-kilter and literature feeds well on this fuel.  Together the men of these islands produce literature of quite sumptuous quality. 
   
  1 - The Top 10 - The British & Irish Men - The 19th Century - An Introduction 
  2 - The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  3 - The Signalman by Charles Dickens 
  4 - The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 
  5 - The Canterville Ghost - Part 1 by Oscar Wilde 
  6 - The Canterville Ghost - Part 2 by Oscar Wilde 
  7 - The Phantom Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling 
  8 - The Dream Woman by Wilkie Collins 
  9 - The Story of B24 by Arthur Conan Doyle 
  10 - The Inconsiderate Waiter by J M Barrie 
  11 - Lost Hearts by M R James 
  12 - Youth - Part 1 by Joseph Conrad 
  13 - Youth - Part 2 by Joseph Conrad

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  28 Disastrous Dates: A (Mostly...

  Poppy Mortimer

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  Poppy Mortimer is hungry for love. Will she find The One, or lose her appetite for men, forever? 
  Smart, attractive, and fueled by wide-eyed optimism, Poppy Mortimer leaves rainy England to start a new life—and find the perfect man—in exotic Australia. Surely somewhere out there, a Chris Hemsworth impersonator is just waiting to whisk her off her feet and show her the real charms of ‘Down Under’. 
  But as Poppy launches into 28 dates, ranging from the outright hysterical to borderline traumatic, it becomes clear she’s going to have to kiss a few frogs—assuming she doesn’t croak first. From the seven-foot giant with a disturbing workout practice, to the exclusive party that turns out to be a lot more than just cocktails and canapes, Poppy starts to wonder if she should sue Disney for giving her false hope. 
  With gusto, humour, and a lot of heart, Poppy digs deep into her past as a child of divorce, and her ongoing journey as a modern woman and devoted romantic. Through laughter, tears, and characters that are truly stranger than fiction, Poppy won’t stop until she finds true love—or something even greater. 
  Fans of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City (or any person who wants to feel better about their own dating life) will love this book. 
  5-STAR REVIEWS: 
  "I laughed so hard in this book I think I peed my pants a few times as who doesn't love a great dating story gone wrong. I hope there is a sequel!" 
  "Very well written plenty of humour and very amusing to read. Most women reading this can relate to the disastrous dates they have had in their lives and maybe look back and laugh at the incidents like in this splendid book." 
  "Hilarious. 'I loved reading the funny and weird dating stories."

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