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  Washington Irving - A Short...

  Washington Irving

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  Washington Irving was born on 3rd April, 1783, the youngest of 11, in New York. 
    
  Irving found his real interests away from school in literature and the theatre.  An outbreak of yellow fever at 15 moved him away from Manhattan and into the surrounding countryside providing valuable settings for later works such as ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. 
   
  By 19 Irving was writing regularly to the New York Morning Chronicle, commenting on the theatrical and social scenes.  When his health began to fail, he was sent on the Grand Tour of Europe.  Bizarrely he ignored most of the great sights on offer to concentrate on developing his social and conversational powers.  His health, though, did improve.  
   
  In 1806, back in New York to study law, he scraped a pass at the bar and then founded with several others the literary magazine Salmagundi. Irving nicknamed the city ‘Gotham City’, a name still in use today.  Moderately successful, the magazine spread Irving’s reputation beyond New York. 
   
  In 1809 while mourning the death of his teenage fiancée Irving finished his first significant book, ‘A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynsasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker’.  It satirised local history, local historians and politics.  It received great critical acclaim. 
   
  Unfortunately his family’s established trading company was now facing great upheavals and Irving was dispatched to England to try to sort it out.  After two years he could see no way out but bankruptcy.  This left him in England with no real employment prospects, and so he returned to writing.  
   
  He sent some short stories back to New York to be published as ‘The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent’.  The first part included ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and was extremely successful.  The sixth part contained ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’.  
   
  Beset by literary piracy, with no copyright law at the time, he set about publishing legitimate copies in England to outwit the bootleggers.  From now on Irving published concurrently in America and England in order to render piracy obsolete.  
   
  In August 1824, he published ‘Tales of a Traveller’, which included the famed ‘The Devil and Tom Walker’.  
   
  In 1826, the American Minister to Spain, invited him to Madrid where he could examine the many historical documents that he had access to.  Irving reveled in both the size of the libraries he was granted access to and their rich quality.  Historical works flowed from his pen further enhancing his reputation and fortune.   
   
  Following the completion of ‘Tales of the Alhambra’ in 1832, Irving returned to America after 17 years abroad. He was now a figurehead of American literature and dispensed advice to Edgar Allan Poe amongst others.  Irving also became an advocate for American copyright legislation.  
   
  A later appointment as Minister to Spain in 1842 left him disheartened at the antics of the various political factions he encountered.  It also afforded him no time to write as he had hoped.  
   
  On his return home he began an ‘Author’s Revised Edition’ of his works agreeing an unprecedented deal for 12 per cent of the retail profits.  
   
  Washington Irving died of a heart attack at his ‘Sunnyside’ home on the 28th November 1859 at the age of 76, a few months after completing his five volume George Washington biography, in whose honour he had been named. 
   
  01 - Washington Irving - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  02 - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving 
  03 - The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving 
  04 - The Art of Book-Making by Washington Irving 
  05 - The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon by Washington Irving 
  06 - John Bull by Washington Irving

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  3 Science Fiction Stories

  Frank Herbert

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  As the title indicates, here are three science fiction stories by Frank Herbert: Missing Link, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, 1959; Operation Haystack, also published in Astounding Science Fiction 1959; and Old Rambling House, published in Galaxy Science Fiction 1958.

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  Caliburn's Fight

  Christopher Cartwright

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  The video was everywhere – a viral sensation sweeping across social media. 
  A golden retriever puppy in Bilbao, Spain. It was placed on a series of different rugs, its fur shifting in real time to match the colors and even the intricate patterns woven into the fabric. The internet was in a frenzy, with hundreds of thousands of comments debating whether it was an elaborate hoax, a genetic anomaly, or something else entirely. 
  But Sam Reilly knew the truth the moment he saw it. 
  This wasn’t a trick. 
  Caliburn, his dog, shared the same genetic trait. 
  The golden retriever was an engineered chimera infused with human and octopus DNA. He was originally designed as a classified military experiment rooted in the legendary craftsmanship of the blacksmith Merlin, who designed King Arthur’s greatest weapons – Excalibur and Caliburn. 
  If the puppy was real, then so too was the danger that followed it. 
  The hunt for Caliburn’s offspring leads Sam into the depths of a forgotten cave – where he stumbles upon an antique Basque Astrolabe that shouldn’t exist. The discovery sets off a chain reaction, dragging Sam into a deadly conflict with a Secret Society that has been protecting a hidden truth since the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804. Meriwether Lewis was murdered to keep the secret buried. 
  The question remains, can Sam work out what to do with the truth, before it gets him killed too?

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  A Nocturne - From their pens to...

  Clothilde Graves

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  Clotilde Augusta Inez Mary Graves was born on the 3rd June 1863 at Buttevant Castle, Co. Cork, to parents with military backgrounds. 
  At age nine, the family moved to Southsea in England for yet another military posting.  Her father’s postings gave her valuable experiences that would be put to good use in later years in some of her literary works. 
  She was educated at a Catholic convent in Lourdes before returning to London in 1884 to study art in Bloomsbury.  She worked part-time at the British Museum and the Royal Female School of Art and generated further income by drawing little pen-and-ink grotesques for the comic papers.  
  A few years later a chance meeting found her writing extra lyrics for a pantomime version of Puss in Boots.  She followed up with several financially successful plays, both in London and New York, and gained a measure of notoriety in one with the comparison of marriage and prostitution.   
  Despite her dramatic success she published her first novel in 1911 under the pseudonym of Richard Dehan which she continued to use for later works.  As well as novels and plays she published collections of short stories which glow with talent and invention. 
  She was an unusual figure in London society, wearing her hair short, taking on a masculine manner and cut of clothing, and smoking cigarettes in public when such traits were considered eccentric at best.  Add to this her admired collection of Chinese and Japanese trophies, her enthusiasm for fly-fishing and her riding of a tricycle and you have a perfect image of this fascinating writer. 
  Clotilde Graves died at the convent of Our Lady of Lourdes at Hatch End in Middlesex, on the 3rd December 1932.  She was 69.

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  Dhoya - From their pens to your...

  W B Yeats

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  William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland on 13th June 1865. 
  His early years moved between Ireland and England. By his mid-teens he was writing but those works were described as ‘entirely Un-Irish’.  With Ernest Rhys he founded the Rhymers Club. Based at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street it’s best described as a drinking club for performing poets.  Yeats later cited them as ‘The Tragic Generation’.  By now Yeats was writing and publishing poetry and stories that were profoundly based in Irish folklore.   
  Yeats is perhaps best described as Ireland’s national poet in addition to being one of the major twentieth-century literary figures of the English tongue. He represents the ‘Romantic poet of modernism,’ with an extraordinary style created from the outward emphasis on the expression of emotions and the extensive use of symbolism, imagery and allusions.  
  In 1923 his fame was brought to an even wider audience when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.  
  His personal life was driven by his many relationships in love and by his great interest in oriental mysticism and occultism.  Yeats also wrote prose and drama and, as an ardent Nationalist, established himself as a spokesman of the Irish cause and served as an Irish senator for two terms.  
  W B Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, on 28th January 1939.  He was 73.

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  Rouge Street - Three Novellas

  Shuang Xuetao

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  Introduced by Madeleine Thien, author of the Booker finalist novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing 
   
  From one of the most highly celebrated young Chinese writers, three dazzling novellas of Northeast China, mixing realism, mysticism, and noir. 
   
  An inventor dreams of escaping his drab surroundings in a flying machine. A criminal, trapped beneath a frozen lake, fights a giant fish. A strange girl pledges to ignite a field of sorghum stalks. 
   
  Rouge Street presents three novellas by Shuang Xuetao, the lauded young Chinese writer whose frank, fantastical short fiction has already inspired comparisons to Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami. Located in China’s frigid Northeast, Shenyang, the  
  author’s birthplace, boasts an illustrious past—legend holds that the emperor’s makeup was manufactured here. But while the city enjoyed renewed importance as an industrial hub under Mao Zedong, China’s subsequent transition from communism to a market  
  economy led to an array of social ills—unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce, suicide—that gritty Shenyang epitomizes. 
   
  Orbiting the toughest neighborhood of a postindustrial city whose vast, inhospitable landscape makes every aspect of life a struggle, these many-voiced missives are united by Shuang Xuetao’s singular style—one that balances hardscrabble naturalism with the  
  transcendent and faces the bleak environs with winning humor. Rouge Street illuminates not only the hidden pains of those left behind in an extraordinary economic boom but also the inspiration and grace they, nevertheless, manage to discover.

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