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  The Oval Portrait - The shortest...

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  This is Edgar Allen Poe's shortest short story. Still, it is one of his most relevant works. It is a tale about an oval portrait hanging in a chateau that has a horrifying history. The painting is surrounded by mistery. After all, one can only wonder about what happened to the young girl depicted in the beautiful, yet haunting, painting. The Oval Portrait may present a brief text, but it is powerful enough to have inspired many authors, including Oscar Wilde and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
  “On the face of it, The Oval Portrait is a moral, even a cautionary, fable about the tragic and dehumanizing effects of artistic obsession,” according to William Freedman, professor of English Literature at the University of Haifa. 
  Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, and literary critic. Poe is well known for his tales of mystery and the macabre. He was one of the America's earliest writers of short stories, and many consider him to be the inventor of the detective fiction. 
  Pete Cross is the winner of the Young Adult Audie Award 2022 for his narration of Ryan La Sala’s Be Dazzled.

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  A Thousand Deaths - From their...

  Jack London

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  John Griffith Chaney was born on January 12th, 1876 in San Francisco.   
  His father, William Chaney, was living with Flora Wellman when she became pregnant.  Chaney insisted she have an abortion.  Flora's response was to turn a gun on herself.  Although her wounds were not severe the trauma made her temporarily deranged. 
  In late 1876 his mother married John London and the young child was brought to live with them as they moved around the Bay area, eventually settling in Oakland where now, calling himself Jack, he completed grade school. 
  Jack worked hard at several jobs, sometimes 12-18 hours a day, but his dream was university.  He studied hard and borrowed the money to enrol in the summer of 1896 at the University of California in Berkeley. 
  In 1897, at 21, Jack searched out newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and for the name of his biological father. He wrote to Chaney, then living in Chicago, who claimed he could not be Jack’s father because he was impotent and casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men.  Jack, devastated by the response, quit Berkeley and went to the Klondike. Other accounts suggest that his dire finances presented Jack with the excuse he needed to leave. 
  In the Klondike Jack began to gather material for his writing but also accumulated many health problems, including scurvy, which together with hip and leg problems he would carry for the rest of his life. 
  During the late 1890's Jack was regularly publishing short stories and by the turn of the century full blown novels. 
  By 1904 Jack had married, fathered two children and was now in the process of divorcing.  A stint as a reporter on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 was equal amounts trouble and experience. But that experience was always put to good use in a continuing and remarkable output of work. 
  In 1905 he married Charmian Kittredge who at last was a soul and companion who brought him some semblance of peace despite his advancing alcoholism and his incurable wanderlust. 
  Twelve years later Jack had amassed both wealth and a literary reputation through such classics as ‘The Call of the Wild’, ‘White Fang’ and many others. He had a reputation as a social activist and was a tireless friend of the workers.   
  Jack London died suffering from dysentery, late-stage alcoholism and uremia, aged only 40, on November 22nd 1916 at his property in Glen Elen in California.

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  Inky Odds

  L. Ron Hubbard

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  The greatest American journalists of the 20th century all made their names on as war correspondents, but none of them would beat out Bat Conroy to a good story. When it comes to the Japanese invasion of China, Bat's always been top dog... until now. An unknown writer is stealing his thunder and maybe even his job — and the most shocking news of all is the true identity of the elusive journalist. Get the news hot off the presses as the audio version of Inky Odds goes to war and delivers the extraordinary story behind the story.

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  Darkness Box

  Ursula K. Le Guin

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  This is the first story I ever got paid for; the second story I ever got published; and maybe the thirtieth or fortieth story I wrote. I had been writing poetry and fiction ever since my brother Ted, tired of having an illiterate five-year-old sister around, taught me to read. At about twenty I began sending things off to publishers. Some of the poetry got printed, but I didn’t get systematic about sending out the fiction till I was getting on to thirty. It kept systematically coming back. 
  “April in Paris” was the first “genre” piece—recognizably fantasy or science fiction—that I had written since 1942, when I wrote an Origin-of-Life-on-Earth story for Astounding, which for some inconceivable reason rejected it (I never did synch with John Campbell). At age twelve I was very pleased to get a genuine printed rejection slip, but by age thirty-two I was very pleased to get a check. “Professionalism” is no virtue; a professional is simply one who gets paid for doing what an amateur does for love. But in a money economy, the fact of being paid means your work is going to be circulated, is going to be read; it’s the means to communication, which is the artist’s goal. Cele Goldsmith Lalli, who bought this story in 1962, was as enterprising and perceptive an editor as the science fiction magazines have ever had, and I am grateful to her for opening the door to me.

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  The Novices of Lerna

  Angel Bonomini

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  The Novices of Lerna introduces the enigmatic fictions of Ángel Bonomini to English listeners for the first time. Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient. The collection's central novella follows Ramón Beltra, an unambitious scholar who receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland. After he reluctantly complies with the unusual qualifying paperwork requiring several pages of detailed measurements and photographs of his entire body, Beltra soon finds himself in the deserted university town of Lerna, together with twenty-three other "novices" subject to the same undisclosed project—all of them doppelgangers of Beltra himself. At first, Beltra is the only one to bristle at the school's dizzying array of rules and regulations, but this all changes with the onset of an uncontrollable epidemic, and the fellows begin dying off one by one . . . 
   
   
   
  An overlooked master of Argentine fantastic literature, Ángel Bonomini garnered praise among peers and contemporaries like Jorge Luis Borges, before slipping mysteriously into obscurity. Bonomini was forty-three years old in 1972 when he published The Novices of Lerna, the first of four books of short stories he released before his death at age sixty-four.

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  The Mtdox - By Mtdox

  Mtdox

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  A paranormal investigator Mtdox is employed by a university to look into a series of mysterious deaths in college Students that some are attributing to supernatural causes.

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