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  Ethel Lina White - A Short Story...

  Ethel Lina White

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  Ethel Lina White was born on the 2nd April 1876 in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, in Wales. 
   
  Her family were wealthy due to her father’s invention of a waterproofing material used, initially, for the London Underground. 
   
  Ethel started writing when she was only a child and published essays and poems in children’s papers.  She was also a talented artist. 
   
  As an adult she began to write short stories and, some years later, she started writing novels.  At the time she was working for the Ministry of Pensions in London but resigned in order to accept an advance of ten pounds and begin a career as a novelist.  It was this determination that helped her become one of the best-known crime writers in the English-speaking world during the 1930’s and 40’s. 
   
  Perhaps her best-known books are the ‘The Lady Vanishes’ and ‘The Spiral Staircase’ both of which were originally entitled differently but were republished with new names after being filmed.  Whilst today she lacks attention, in her day she was as popular and as highly regarded as Agatha Christie. 
   
  Ethel Lina White died in London on the 13th of August 1944 of ovarian cancer.  She was 68. 
   
  In her will she made a bizarre condition in order for her sister to receive her estate of £5737.  It read: "I give and bequeath unto Annis Dora White all that I possess on condition she pays a qualified surgeon to plunge a knife into my heart after death."   In life she had a fear of being buried alive.

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  A Saga of the Seas - From their...

  Kenneth Grahame

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  Kenneth Grahame was born on 8th March 1859 in Edinburgh. 
  At age 5 his mother succumbed to puerperal fever.  His father, who had a drinking problem, now sent his 4 children to live with their grandmother at her large house in Cookham, Berkshire. Here the children lived in large open grounds next to the river.  These early experiences would in later years, be retold in his writing through a myriad of characters. 
  Grahame loved being a pupil at St Edward's School, Oxford and wanted to enroll at the university there but his guardian demurred on account of the cost. 
  Instead, a banking career was chosen for him, starting in 1879 at the Bank of England, where he rose steadily to the rank of its Secretary until retiring, with a pension, in 1908 due to ill health. 
  Alongside his commercial career Grahame had written and published various stories and essays in several periodicals. Some were anthologized as ‘Pagan Papers’ in 1893, and two years later ‘The Golden Age’ and later still ‘Dream Days’ and its masterpiece ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ became part of many home libraries.  His ability to view life through the lens of a young and curious child was superb, enabling the reader to easily identify with the character.   
  Grahame married Elspeth Thomson in 1899 and they had one child; Alastair, born semi-blind and plagued by health problems.  In a heart-rending tragedy he would later take his own life whilst attending Oxford University in 1920.   
  In 1908 Grahame reworked many of the bedtime stories he had fashioned for his son into the enduring favourite; ‘The Wind in the Willows’, describing the heart-warming adventures of Mr Toad and his friends.   
  Kenneth Grahame died in Pangbourne, Berkshire, on 6th July 1932.

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  Forgotten Authors The - Women -...

  Anna Maria Hall, George Sand,...

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  Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society. 
  In literature the ambition is much narrower.  In order to be known, to be popular, you had to be published.  And for that people had to know you existed and your ideas worth reading.  Obviously for most of humanity’s time people couldn’t read and texts couldn’t be published in any great number. 
  In the 15th Century Gutenberg’s printing press began the revolution to address the second and by the 19th century had gathered pace with startling speed and mass distribution.  Education for the many was brought in to help people understand more of their world and, with new skills, how to have a better place within it.  Now, if the powers that owned the presses and means of distribution agreed an audience would now be able to avail themselves of your ideas, your printed words.  
  All too often the talents of women have been scorned, mocked and laughed at.  In reality that was more usually by those who’s own talents were hardly fit to even grace their shadows.   
  But society in general still connived and set women to one side in almost everything that men considered their rightful territory.  And literature was one such territory.  Remarkably resilient as well as talented these women strove to be published, to show themselves as equals.  The results more often than not proved that they were.  
  Sadly, in the thirst for the new, the recent and the past fell from sight, relegated to dark corners and dusty shelves.    
  But the printed word is rarely without someone, somewhere busying themselves through piles of papers and books rediscovering what a good story is, whatever its age. 
  In this volume we offer up a small selection of talents from the literary landscape of 1800 to 1849 and the Women authors whose time has now come again.

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  Queer Little Nightmares

  David Ly, Daniel Zomparelli

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  The fiction and poetry of Queer Little Nightmares reimagines monsters old and new through a queer lens, subverting the horror gaze to celebrate ideas and identities canonically feared in monster lit. Throughout history, monsters have appeared in popular culture as stand-ins for the non-conforming, the marginalized of society. Pushed into the shadows as objects of fear, revulsion, and hostility, these characters have long conjured fascination and self-identification in the LGBTQ+ community, and over time, monsters have become queer icons. 
  In Queer Little Nightmares, creatures of myth and folklore seek belonging and intimate connection, cryptids challenge their outcast status, and classic movie monsters explore the experience of coming into queerness. The characters in these stories and poems — the Minotaur camouflaged in a crowd of cosplayers, a pubescent werewolf, a Hindu revenant waiting to reunite with her lover, a tender-hearted kaiju, a lagoon creature aching for the swimmers above him, a ghost of Pride past — relish their new sparkle in the spotlight. Pushing against tropes that have historically been used to demonize, the queer creators of this collection instead ask: What does it mean to be (and to love) a monster? 
  Contributors include Amber Dawn, David Demchuk, Hiromi Goto, jaye simpson, Eddy Boudel Tan, Matthew J. Trafford, and Kai Cheng Thom.

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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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  Grandmother and the Priests -...

  Taylor Caldwell

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  New York Times Bestseller: In Victorian Britain, an affluent woman hosts a group of Catholic priests in her home—and listens as they tell their stories. Rose, a young girl visiting her grandmother, sits among eleven priests from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. As each guest shares the most challenging moments of their vocations, tests of faith that have brought them face-to-face with the miseries, temptations, and evils that lurk beyond the peaceful confines of the rectory, their worldly, wealthy hostess and her granddaughter come to learn the struggles and outcomes of these confrontations with the human condition. “The priests themselves represent a mixed lot—men of exalted backgrounds, culture, worldly experience, who have found their hardest task bringing themselves down to the humble people of their flocks; men who understand only the intellectual, realistic aspects of their faith—and must learn to accept the mystical as well; men who hide their saintliness under uncouth exteriors, who learn the hard way to love their fellow men, who encounter devils as well as saints, murderers, sinners. . . . Lively reading.” —Kirkus Reviews

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