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  How Much Land Does A Man Need

  Leo Tolstoy

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  Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Russian province of Tula to a wealthy noble family. As a child, he had private tutors but he showed little interest in any formal education. When he went to the University of Kazan in 1843 to study oriental languages and law, he left without completing his courses.  Life now was relaxed and idle but with some writing also taking place.  Gambling debts forced an abrupt change of path and he joined the army to fight in the Crimean War.  He was commended for his bravery and promoted but was appalled at the brutality and loss of life.  He recorded these and other earlier experiences in his diaries which formed the basis of several of his works. 
   
  In 1852 ‘Childhood’ was published to immediate success and was followed by ‘Boyhood’ and ‘Youth’. 
   
  His experience in the army and the horrors he witnessed resulted in ‘The Cossacks’ in 1862 and the trilogy ‘Sevastopol Tales’. After the war he travelled around Europe, visiting London and Paris and meeting such luminaries as Victor Hugo and Charles Darwin.  
   
  It was now that Tolstoy began his masterpiece, ‘War and Peace’. Published in 1869 it was an epic work that changed literature. He quickly followed this with ‘Anna Karenina’.  
   
  These successes made Tolstoy rich and helped him accomplish many of his dreams but also brought problems as he grappled with his faith and the lot of the oppressed poor. These revolutionary views became so popular that the authorities now kept him under surveillance.  
   
  He led a life of asceticism and vegetarianism and put his socialist ideals into practice by establishing numerous schools for the poor and food programmes. He also believed in giving away his wealth, which caused much discord with his wife.  
   
  His writing continued to bring forth classics such as ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ and many brilliant and incisive short stories such as ‘How Much Land Does A Man Need’.  
   
  In 1901 Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Church and controversially deselected for the Nobel Prize for Literature. 
   
  Whilst undertaking a pilgrimage by train in October 1910 with his daughter Aleksandra he caught pneumonia in the nearby town of Astapovo.  Leo Tolstoy died on November 9th, 1910, he was 82.

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  Christmas Grace

  Leslie Lynch

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  No one wants to celebrate Christmas this year. Not Ella McKendrick, who, on the cusp of success as a potter, is tasked with her husband’s company party on too-short notice. She gives up her first pottery sale to pitch in, but the joy of the season is diminished. Not Gertie Wycliffe, Ella’s mom, a new widow who is doing everything she can to avoid her first Christmas alone. No one understands the grief and terror she feels—maybe because the craziness of a seventy-four-year-old woman signing up for skydiving lessons is all she lets them see. Not Natalie Shaw, Ella’s pregnant daughter. Natalie’s husband is deployed halfway around the world, and she believes that ignoring the holiday might blunt her loneliness. Then disaster strikes, not once but twice. Three generations; three untenable situations. Three women who come together for each other, and remember what’s most important about Christmas.

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  Short Stories for Older Children

  Dandi Palmer

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  It is easy to think that the reality we know is the only one. 
  But the galaxy is immense and full of other possibilities. 
  There are also dimensions where existence is not tangible for its inhabitants. 
  We would call them ghosts. 
  These stories are free to read at www.dandipal.uk

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  Under the Red Flag - Stories

  Ha Jin

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  “The spirit of a rural town during China's Cultural Revolution is captured” in this Flannery O’Connor Award-winning short story collection (Publishers Weekly).   The acclaimed poet Ha Jin was raised in China and emigrated to the United States after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In Under the Red Flag, he writes about loss and moral deterioration with the keen sense of a survivor. His stories examine life in the bleak rural town of Dismount Fort, where privacy is nonexistent and paranoia rules as neighbor turns against neighbor, husband turns against wife, state turns against individual, history turns against humanity.  In "A Man-to-Be," an engaged militiaman participates in a gang rape, but finds himself impotent when he looks into the eyes of the victim. His fiancee's family breaks off the engagement, not because of the rape, but because they doubt his virility. In "Winds and Clouds over a Funeral," a Communist leader disobeys his mother's last wish for burial to keep his good standing in the party, but his enemies bring him down for being a bad son. "In Broad Daylight" is the story of the public humiliation of a woman accused of being a whore. Her dignified defiance is gradually stripped away as she is dragged through the streets, cursed and spat upon by strangers and family alike.

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  Angel in Disguise An

  T. S. Arthur

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  Timothy Shay Arthur (1809 – 1885) who wrote as T.S. Arthur, was a popular 19th-century American author. "An Angel in Disguise" is an uplifting story of a childless couple who reluctantly take in a disabled child and discover what joy and fulfillment it brings them.

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  Mother and Daughter

  Augusta Webster

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  Uncompleted at her death, Augusta Webster's posthumously published sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter celebrates the relationship between a mother and her only child. As well as reflecting on aging and mortality, the sonnets express joy and love. This volume includes seven additional sonnets on other themes. - Summary by Newgatenovelist

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