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  The Ancient Anarchist and Other...

  Bhaasita Athani

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  Bukpa had a layer of sweat on his face that he hadn’t wiped for a long time. He didn’t want to get distracted. There was a vague pain in his chest. The moment he paid attention to it, it increased. It was fear. He didn’t think it would be this frightening. He had imagined it very differently. He thought he would go there with immense bravery in his heart and they would all attack the elders’ huts of the Jandunga tribe and return with immense pride back to their own tribe. What he felt in his heart was anything but bravery and he couldn’t see pride anywhere in the distance. All he could see was doom. Chaos, pain, and death. Step into the world of the Ancient Anarchist like never before with this immersive audiobook adaptation.

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  Before the Supreme Court - From...

  Lafcadio Hearn

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  Lafcadio Hearn was born on the 27th June 1850 on the Ionian isle of Levkás in Greece to a British Army officer and a Greek Mother. 
  His father, fearing for his career prospects at being married to a Greek Orthodox wife, sent them to Dublin whilst he continued to advance his career with further postings.  Life there was difficult for mother and son.  His father returned, wounded and traumatised, when Lafcadio was three.  He annulled the marriage and she remarried but had to give up care of Lafcadio to her sister-in law.   
  After brief periods for Catholic education in England and France he emigrated to Ohio in the United States when he was 19, taking on a series of casual jobs before embarking on a career as a journalist, publishing poems and essays in Cincinnati.  It was whilst here that he began a side-line in translating, starting with Gautier and Flaubert.  He married in 1874 to a 20 year old African-American woman in violation of Ohio's anti-miscegenation law.  The marriage soon failed. 
  In 1877 he relocated to New Orleans to write on a variety of themes before picking up a two year assignment from Harper’s to write in the West Indies, where he also wrote his first novel. 
  In 1890 Harper’s sent him to Japan.  Here he left journalism and took the remarkable decision to become a schoolteacher in the north of Japan.   Enraptured by the culture he was driven to explain it in various Western publications to those who had little, if any, knowledge of its culture.  Within the year he had fallen in love with, and married, a high-born Japanese lady, together they would have four children.   
  In 1895 he became a Japanese national and took the name Koizumi Yakumo, Koizumi being his wife’s family name. 
  The following few years, whilst a professor of Literature at the Imperial University of Japan, were his most creative and admired period.   
  Lafcadio Hearn died of heart failure on the 26th of September 1904, in Tokyo, Japan shortly before leaving to deliver a series of lectures at Cornell University in New York State.  He was 54.

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  The Nose - Gogol uses the absurd...

  Nikolai Gogol

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  Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born on 1st April 1809 to a father, descended from Ukrainian Cossacks and a mother with a military background in the Ukrainian town of Sorochyntsi, then part of the Russian Empire and rich in Cossack traditions and folklore.   
   
  His father wrote poetry and plays which the young Gogol helped stage at his uncle’s home theatre.  This helped ignite in him a love of literature and blossomed when he attended, what is now, the Nizhyn Gogol State University at the age of 12.  Here he participated in school theatre productions and refined his mastery of his native Ukrainian and also the Russian of his Imperial masters. 
   
  In 1828 he went to St Petersburg and unsuccessfully tried to begin a career as an actor after finding that with no money and no connections the civil service was barred to him. 
   
  Embezzling money from his mother he embarked on a trip to Germany. When the money ran out, he returned to St Petersburg but the experiences were used in a series of stories he contributed to periodicals.  These tales were steeped in his childhood memories of the Ukrainian landscape and peasantry enlivened with the supernatural of its folklore woven with realistic events of the day.  He wrote in Russian in a whimsical, colloquial style with a smattering of Ukrainian words and phrases that provided an authenticity.  Eight stories were published as ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’.  Seemingly all at once fame and fortune arrived. Gogol was hailed by his contemporaries, including Pushkin, as a pre-eminent writer of Russian literature.   
   
  His success continued with his brilliant plays ‘The Inspector General’ and the comedy ‘The Marriage for the Theatre’, both being highly acclaimed.   
   
  In 1834 he became Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg but with little academic or teacher training, failed to adequately fulfil many of his duties and soon resigned this post.  With no obligations and using his earnings from his writing, which now included the impressionistic and immortal ‘Dead Souls’, Gogol travelled around Europe, spending the most time in Rome where he studied art, read Italian literature and developed a passion for opera.  
   
  In the 1840s Gogol became preoccupied with a need to purify his soul and embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In tandem he fell under the influence of a strict and austere spiritual ascetic who persuaded him to observe strict fasts that, allied with his depression and deteriorating health, contributed to his death on 21st April 1852 at the age of only 43. 
   
  In the Nose Gogol reaches out with the absurd premise that a Nose can have, and enjoy, a life of its own regardless of the complications and consequences to its former owner.

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  Conan Doyle - Short Stories -...

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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  Head Stories presents the 3rd volume of Selected Short Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, narrated by Simon Hester. With original music.The Brown Hand - Upon his return from India, an eminent doctor is haunted by a patient in search of something that was taken from him.The King of the Foxes - In an effort to shake off a hangover a young man joins a fox hunt, only to experience much more than he expected!Lot 249 - An Oxford medical student is warned not to become familiar with his mysterious neighbouring student. He soon finds out why.How It Happened - A recollection of a dramatic motoring accident.The Terror of Blue John Gap - Whilst convalescing in Derbyshire, a young man is determined to discover what lurks in the local caves.The Contest - A Greek poet finds himself in an unlooked for competition with a powerful stranger.An Iconoclast - The origin story of the "Venus de Milo".The Blighting of Captain Sharkey - A notorious Pirate meets his nemesis.The Lost Special - The mysterious case of a disappearing train.A Pastoral Horror - A quiet Austrian village witnesses a series of horrific murders.John Barrington Cowles - The writer narrates the tragic story of his friend's death and his suspicions and fears as to the cause.The Curse of Eve - A touching story of a difficult birth.

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  Exchange is Robbery - From their...

  Richard Marsh

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  Richard Bernard Heldmann was born on 12th October 1857, in St Johns Wood, North London.  
  By his early 20’s Heldmann began publishing fiction for the myriad magazine publications that had sprung up and were eager for good well-written content.  
  In October 1882, Heldmann was promoted to co-editor of Union Jack, a popular magazine, but his association with the publication ended suddenly in June 1883.  It appears Heldman was prone to issuing forged cheques to finance his lifestyle.  In April 1884 he was sentenced to 18 months hard labour. 
  In order to be well away from the scandal and the damage that this had caused to his reputation Heldmann adopted a pseudonym on his release from jail.  Shortly thereafter the name ‘Richard Marsh’ began to appear in the literary periodicals.  The use of his mother’s maiden name as part of it seems both a release and a lifeline. 
  A stroke of very good fortune arrived with his novel ‘The Beetle’ published in 1897.  This would turn out to be his greatest commercial success and added some much-needed gravitas to his literary reputation.   
  Marsh was a prolific writer and wrote almost 80 volumes of fiction as well as many short stories, across many genres from horror and crime to romance and humour.   His unusual characters, plotting devices and other literary developments have identified his legacy as one of the best British writers of his time.   
  Richard Marsh died from heart disease in Haywards Heath in Sussex on 9th August 1915.  He was 57.

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  The Light That Saves

  Karyne Norton

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  She plundered his ship, and he fell in love... 
  When Pirate Redwood plunders Captain Moss' ship to entertain her crew, she discovers he's already stolen her most valued possession: an ancient cutlass. She takes it back, but it's only one of four relics they're both determined to find. Friendly competition turns deadly when a third sailor joins the hunt, and Redwood is forced to decide which treasure to go after: the relics she's vowed to protect or the man who's stolen her heart. 
  This story is a companion novella to Blood of the Stars, the first book in The Half-Light Chronicles, and the story is referenced in chapter twenty-six of the full novel.

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