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  Have Mercy On Us

  Lisa Cupolo

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  Each of the ten stories in Have Mercy on Us is an illuminating window into a human life. In the way of all the best fiction, these stories enlarge our understanding of what it means to be alive, with characters who leap off the page. In this award-winning collection, the people are varied in age, race, and origin. An old man travels to a village in Kenya in an attempt to bring his estranged son home; against her mother’s wishes, a young woman attends the funeral of the father she never met, hoping to forge a relationship with her eight siblings; a woman long married to a renowned artist whose infidelity is nearly blatant, takes things into her own hands in a brilliantly realized moment of independence; in an imagined, loving portrait, the writer Zora Neale Hurston is shown near the end of her life in 1948, working as a maid in a motel in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Spare, romantic without being sentimental, these powerful stories are, above all, about love, and the impossible and remarkable ways we yearn for connection. Cupolo’s writing is rich with vision, insight and grace—cause for celebration.

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  A Somewhat Improbable Story -...

  G K Chesterton

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  G K Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was a poet, novelist, playwright, literary commentator, editor, biographer, journalist, orator and theologian.  He was often dubbed as the “prince of paradox” for his light whimsical style that often addressed serious issues such as politics and religion.  The latter was as a member and defender of the Christian faith and the former was shaped by a distrust of concentrated wealth and power.  He advocated Distributionism and said that every man should be allowed to own "three acres and a cow."  These political views have spread round the world, crediting Chesterton as the father of the “small is beautiful” movement.  It is also said to have influenced Gandhi in seeking a genuine nationalism for India rather than imitating the British state.   
  Chesterton was remarkably prolific but perhaps his most famous creation is Father Brown.  Within this character Chesterton’s clever writing and profound ideas reveal truths, often with humour as the detective priest pursues the answers to his cases.

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  In Our Time

  Ernest Hemingway

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  "He was alone, and he was comfortable. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to understand."
  
  In Our Time is a collection of vignettes and short stories that marked the arrival of Ernest Hemmingway as a bold new voice in American literature. The works contained herein explore the themes of war, loss, love, alienation and disillusionment that are prominent in much of the author's work while encapsulating the struggles faced by individuals in the rapidly changing, post-war world. From the trenches of World War I to quiet moments of reflection in nature, Hemingways use of spare, precise prose delivers a sense of moral value and a powerful punch of emotional truth.
  
  The titles included in this collection, in order of appearance, are:
  
  - On the Quai at Smyrna
  - Indian Camp
  - The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife
  - The End of Something
  - The Three-Day Blow
  - The Battler
  - A Very Short Story
  - Soldier's Home
  - The Revolutionist
  - Mr. and Mrs. Elliot
  - Cat in the Rain
  - Out of Season
  - Cross-Country Snow
  - My Old Man
  - Big Two-Hearted River: Part 1
  - Big Two-Hearted River: Part 2
  - L' Envoi
  Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist renowned for his econimical, understated prose, adventurous lifestyle and outspoken public image. He began his career as a reporter and published a number of short stories before gaining fame with novels such as The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), and his experiences during the Spanish Civil War informed the best-selling For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and some of his seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works have become classics of American literature.
  This audiobook is fully indexed. Once downloaded, each book and chapter will be listed so you can easily navigate to the individual sections.

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  A Very Short Romance - From...

  Vsevolod Garshin

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  Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was born on 14th February 1855 in what is now Dnipro in the Ukraine, but then part of the Russian Empire. 
  After attending secondary school he studied at the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute.  
  Wars between and on behalf of Empires were a regular feature of the decades then.  Garshin volunteered to serve in the Russian army at the beginning of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877.  
  He began as a private in the Balkans campaign and was wounded in action.  By the end of the war, in 1878, he had been promoted to officer rank.  
  By now Garshin, having previously published some articles and reviews in newspapers, wished to devote himself to a literary career.  The decision made he resigned his army commission. 
  His time as a soldier provided rich experiences for his early stories. His first ‘Four Days’ was related as the interior monologue of a wounded soldier left for dead on the battlefield for four days, face to face with the corpse of a Turkish soldier he had killed, gained him early admiration as an author of note.  
  He wrote perhaps only 20 stories, but their influence was immense, although in these more modern times he is barely remembered and lives in the more prolific shadows of others.  His characters are superbly worked into stories that come alive in the intensity and reality of his prose.   
  Garshin’s most well-known story is ‘The Red Flower’, also known as ‘Scarlet Blossom’ and is easily amongst the first rank of stories dealing with mental health issues.  
  Despite early literary success, he himself experienced periodical bouts of mental illness.   
  In one such bout Garshin attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself down the stone stairs leading into his apartment building.  Although not immediately fatal, Vsevolod Garshin died as a result of his injuries in a St Petersburg hospital on 5th April 1888.  He was 33.

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  Mother

  Owen Wister

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  Owen Wister (July 14, 1860 - July 21, 1938) was an American writer and historian, considered the "father" of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing a biography of Ulysses S. Grant and the novel The Virginian, in which Wister created the archetypal cowboy.

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  The Dreaming

  Andre Bagoo

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  These stories have the virtue of taking the everyday lives of gay Trinidadian men utterly for granted in their searches for adventure, pleasure, self-realisation, loving contact and sex. Written with a sharpness of perception and in a variety of engaging personal voices, these narratives find room for humour, tragic haircuts, and a connection between tattoos and terrible poetry. But they also acknowledge very real fears in a society where there is still prejudice, discrimination and homophobic violence. The narrator of several of these pieces is a writer who wants to focus on the pleasures and inner dramas of these lives as the truth about gay experience. But there are also the stories of brutal murders reported with coy innuendo in the press. If he is tempted to see his lovers as characters in a witty fiction of manners, is this the novel that can be written in Trinidad? And since this is Trinidad, could the conflicted, self-hating Dorian really be a serial killer? But then when one of Bagoo's writer narrators unwittingly alarms his writing buddies by the freedom of his gothic imagination, who knows what might be true. Not for nothing does the author include the singer Kate Bush with her Wuthering Heights in his acknowledgements. Bagoo's stories offer a witty and incisive portrait of contemporary Trinidad in all its intersections of race, class and gender politics. Not least, they have a strong sense of place – Bagoo's gay Woodbrook offers a fine sequel to V.S. Naipaul's Woodbrook in his classic Miguel Street.

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