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  This Is Salvaged - Stories

  Vauhini Vara

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  Stories of uncanny originality from a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 
   
   
   
  Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, Vauhini Vara explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbor, or lover, and the relationships between self and others. A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible's specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This Is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.

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  The Diary of a God - From their...

  Barry Pain

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  Barry Eric Odell Pain was born at 3 Sydney Street in Cambridge on 28th September 1864. He was one of 4 children. 
  He was educated at Sedbergh School and then Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he read classics and contributed to and edited Granta. 
  Four years of service as an Army coach followed before he moved to London. In 1889, Cornhill Magazine published his short story ‘The Hundred Gates’.  This opened the way for Pain to advance his literary career on several fronts. He became a contributor to Punch and The Speaker, as well as joining the staff of both the Daily Chronicle and Black and White.  
  In 1897 he succeeded Jerome K Jerome as editor of To-Day but still contributed regularly, until 1928, to the Windsor Magazine. 
  It is often said that Pain was discovered by Robert Louis Stevenson, who compared his work to that of Guy de Maupassant.  It’s an apt comparison. Pain was also a master of disturbing prose but able to inject parody and light comedy into many of his works.  A simple premise could in his hands suddenly expand into a world very real but somehow emotionally fraught and on the very edge of darkness as many of these short stories demonstrate.   
  Despite applying his talents to several genres and forms today Pain is more readily thought of, especially during the first decade of the 20th Century, as perhaps the leading British humorist of his day.  These stories reveal a darker side and beg to differ. 
  Barry Pain died on 5th May 1928 in Bushey, Hertfordshire.

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  Hearts and Hands

  O. Henry

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  The story "Hearts and Hands" of the well-known American writer O. Henry was published for the first time in the collection "Remains" in 1917. In the Baltimore express all places were taken, only one bench opposite an young nice lady was free. At this time two guys entered the coach: one of them was impudent, and the second one - glum-faced. These two characters didn't represent anything unusual, except the handcuffs which held their hands among themselves. The lady recognized one of them and addressed him. The young man showed the girl the handcuffs and said that he couldn't shake her hand. He wanted to explain something but the second forestalled him. This man introduced himself as a criminal and his attendant as a marshal. The story seems to be quite plain, but its salt is hidden in the last two sentences which reveal the real state of things.A SmartTouch Media production.

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  Annabel Lee

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  Title: Annabel Lee 
  Author: Edgar Allan Poe 
  Narrator: Not included / Various Public Domain Recordings Available 
  Original Publication: 1849 
  Public Domain: Yes 
  Series Placement: Timeless Terrors No. 61 
  Description: 
  Annabel Lee is Edgar Allan Poe’s final completed poem — a haunting ballad of love so powerful it defies even death. Set in a “kingdom by the sea,” the narrator recounts a romance with the beautiful Annabel Lee, a bond so pure and radiant that even celestial powers grow jealous. What follows is a tragic tale of loss, longing, and eternal devotion, as the speaker clings to the memory of his beloved despite the grave’s cold claim. 
  Poe weaves together the gothic and the ethereal, transforming grief into lyrical beauty. The sea becomes both a backdrop and a specter — its tides echoing the relentless pull of memory and the undying heartbeat of the narrator’s love. 
  A cornerstone of American Romanticism, Annabel Lee endures as one of literature’s most poignant meditations on love’s refusal to fade, reminding us that some bonds remain unbroken, “in this kingdom by the sea.”

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  Typhoon and Other Stories

  Joseph Conrad

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  In these four stories, written between 1900 and 1902, Joseph Conrad bid gradual farewell to his adventurous life at sea and began to confront the more daunting complexities of life on land in the twentieth century. In 'Typhoon' Conrad reveals, in the steadfast courage of an undemonstrative captain and the imaginative readiness of his young first mate, the differences between instinct and intelligence in a partnership vital to human survival. 'Falk', the companion sea-story, contrasts, as Conrad once put it, 'common sentimentalism with the frank standpoint of a more or less primitive man', a man with a conscience, however, about the girl he desires. In one of the 'land-stories' Conrad explores the utter isolation of an East European emigrant in England; in the other, the plight of a woman ironically trapped by the unwitting alliance of two retired widowers - each blind in his own way.

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  John Davys Beresford - Six of...

  John Davys Bereford

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  John Davys Beresford was born on 17th March 1873.  His life was blighted by infantile paralysis which left him partially disabled. 
  After an education at Oundle school he trained to be an architect.  However, he quickly decided that his life was to be centred on a literary career.  His first offerings were in drama and as a journalist. 
  As well as being a book reviewer for the Manchester Guardian he contributed to New Statesman, The Spectator, Westminster Gazette, and the Theosophist magazine The Aryan Path.   
  His spiritual journey in early adulthood had claimed him as an agnostic, in defiance of his clergyman father.  This view he later abandoned in preference to describing himself as a Theosophist and a pacifist. 
  As well as many novels, many themed with spiritual and philosophical elements.  Beresford was also a gifted short story writer particularly across the science-fiction, horror and ghost genres. 
  All of these elements helped him to obtain a prominent place in Edwardian Literary London. 
  John Davys Beresford died on the 2nd February 1947. He was 73.

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