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  Winter Dreams - Author of the...

  F Scott itzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
   
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
   
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
   
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. 
   
  In ‘Winter Dreams’ Fitzgerald carefully unravels the life of a young entrepreneur who, many years before, meets a hauntingly beautiful woman at the summer resort where he caddies.

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  The Best American Mystery and...

  S. A. Cosby, Steph Cha

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  A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby, author of Razorblade Tears, and series editor Steph Cha. 
  In his introduction, guest editor S. A. Cosby observes that writing short stories is “a special skill that combines brevity with wit and cleverness and the hint of the existential malaise that imbues crime fiction with its gravitas.” The stories in this col-lection overflow with gravitas in the most unexpected ways: a cryptic note left on a windshield, a murder for hire meets a game of Mouse Trap, a swipe right on a dating app goes horribly wrong. From an eleven-year-old drawn to the neighborhood spookhouse to a scholarship kid at an exclusive boarding school, a nefarious Old West gunman to a Florida woman’s struggle against both outer and inner demons, the characters in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 are haunted and haunting, and wholly unforgettable.  
  The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 includes MEGAN ABBOTT • ALYSSA COLE • TANANARIVE DUE • ABBY GENI • JORDAN HARPER • GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD •TONI LP KELNER • BOBBY MATHEWS • LISA UNGER • and others

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  Cain - From their pens to your...

  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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  Gazing at the Moon - 1500 years...

  Lucian of Samosata, Francis...

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  Collected here are six tales that span nearly two thousand years, from a Roman citizen writing a satire of the ‘historical’ literature of his time in 182 AD to Edgar Allan Poe exploring the idea of a scientific ascent to the moon in 1835. Humanity changed vastly across that time, and yet the moon never lost its allure, its promise of mystery and magic. By the late nineteenth century, it was clear that the moon’s surface was barren, and a wave of moon-based stories inaugurated the expansion into space of fiction. 
  Before we breached the atmosphere and sent men to our planet’s satellite, humanity spent countless millennia gazing up at the moon and wondering what might be there, telling stories by firelight of the mystery and magic of our constant and changing night-time companion.

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  The Monkey's Paw

  W. W. Jacobs

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  The Monkey's Paw is a classic horror short story written by author W. W. Jacobs, published in England in 1902. In the story, the paw of a dead monkey is a talisman that grants its possessor three wishes, but the wishes come with an enormous price.

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  No Sweetness Here - And Other...

  Ama Ata Aidoo

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  From the author of Changes: these stories “of post-independence Ghana in the late 1960s are written beautifully and wisely and with great subtlety” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi).   In this short story collection, the award-winning poet and author of Changes and Our Sister Killjoy explores postcolonial life in Ghana with her characteristic honesty, humor, and insight. A house servant wonders what independence means in a country where indoor plumbing is still reserved for bosses. A brother tracks down his runaway sister only to find she has become a prostitute. In the title story, a bitter divorce turns tragic when the couple’s only child dies of a snake bite.   In these and other stories, tradition wrestles with new urban influences as Africans try to sort out their identity in a changing culture, and “even at her gravest, Miss Aidoo writes with a sunny charm” (The New York Times).

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