Other books that might interest you

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  Beyond All Reasonable Doubt...

  Melissa Lozada-Oliva

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  From the author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria comes an ethereal and revelatory short story collection about faith, delusion, and the demons that can't get enough of us.A beheaded body interrupts a quinceañera. An obsession with her father's bizarre video game shifts a lonely girl's reality. A sentient tail sprouts from a hospital worker's backside, throwing her romantic life into peril. And in the novella "Community Hole," a recently cancelled musician flees New York and finds herself in a haunted punk house in Boston.This collection, at once playful, grisly, and tender, presents a tapestry of women ailing for something to believe in—even if it hurts them. Using body horror, fabulism, and humor, Melissa Lozada-Oliva mines the pain and uncanniness of the modern world. Reveling in the fine line between disgust and desire, Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! is for the sinner in us all.

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  Marcel Schwob - A Short Story...

  Marcel Schwob

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  Mayer André Marcel Schwob was born in Chaville, Hauts-de-Seine, France on 23rd August 1867 into a cultivated Jewish family.  
   
  As a child he devoured the works of Poe and Stevenson in French and then again in English.  His attachment to the bizarre and dark was already forming. 
   
  His education at the Lycée of Nantes earned him the 1st Prize for Excellence.  In 1881, he was in Paris with his maternal uncle to study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.  Schwob quickly developed his multilingual abilities and then studied philology and Sanscrit at the École pratique des hautes études before completing his military service in Vannes with the artillery. 
   
  After completing a Bachelor of Arts in 1888 he became a professional journalist and worked for the Phare de la Loire, the Événement and L'Écho de Paris. 
   
  The 1890’s marked his establishment as a brilliant writer with the publication of six short story collections.   
   
  He fell ill in 1896 with a chronic, incurable intestinal disorder.  He also suffered recurring bouts of influenza and pneumonia.  Intestinal surgery was given several times, at first with success but, by 1900, after two more surgeries, he was told that nothing more could be done for him.  Schwob now existed on kefir and fermented milk. 
   
  By the turn of the century, despite failing health, and often too ill to write, he embarked on several long travels, including to Vailima in the South Pacific where his literary hero Stevenson had died.  
   
  Schwob was regarded as a symbolist writer and a ‘precursor of Surrealism’.  He wrote over a hundred short stories, journalistic articles, essays, biographies, literary reviews and analysis, translations and plays.  
   
  Marcel Schwob died on 26th February 1905 of Pneumonia.  He was 37. 
   
  01 - Marcel Schwob - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  02 - Arachne by Marcel Schwob 
  03 - Spiritualism by Marcel Schwob 
  04 - The Mouthless by Marcel Schwob 
  05 - The Opium Gates by Marcel Schwob 
  06 - The Strong by Marcel Schwob

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  Are You Happy? - Stories

  Lori Ostlund

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  "Once I read the first story in Are You Happy?, I put aside everything else to savor the rest. This is a wise collection, capturing its characters swimming upstream to encounter their fates. With vivid and compassionate prose that explores the countless ways we betray and then rediscover ourselves, Lori Ostlund reminds us of the vitality of the genre." 
  —Jai Chakrabarti, author of A Play for the End of the World and A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness 
   
   
   
  Nine exquisite stories that explore class, desire, identity, and the specter of violence that looms daily over women and the LGBTQ+ community. 
   
   
   
  An aspiring veterinarian survives a plane crash and starts life over in California. A woman mourns the loss of her childhood friend's innocence and rethinks justice. A queer teacher's sense of safety in the classroom is destroyed. With settings ranging from small-town Minnesota to New Mexico, from bars and bedrooms to a furniture store and a community college, Are You Happy? casts a spotlight on people who try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and notions of self. In prose that is evocative and restrained, unpredictable and masterful, Lori Ostlund offers a darkly humorous and compassionate examination of America's preoccupation with loneliness, happiness, guns, and violence.

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  The Oval Portrait

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  A shadowy, candlelit chamber in a crumbling gothic mansion. A man in 19th-century clothing gazes up at a large, ornately framed portrait of a beautiful woman, her eyes lifelike and sorrowful. The room is draped in shadows and rich tapestries. A cold draft stirs the curtains. The atmosphere is haunting, melancholic, and filled with artistic reverence and dread. 
  The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe is a haunting, compact masterpiece of gothic fiction, blending themes of obsession, art, and mortality. First published in 1842, this eerie short story follows a weary traveler who, while resting in an abandoned chateau, becomes transfixed by a striking portrait of a young woman—one that seems almost unnervingly alive. 
  As he uncovers the painting’s backstory, the tale takes a dark and unforgettable turn. What emerges is a chilling meditation on the destructive power of artistic passion, and the blurred line between life and art. 
  This full audiobook brings Poe’s rich, atmospheric prose to life with immersive narration that captures the tale’s dread and melancholy. Ideal for listeners drawn to classic horror, literary symbolism, and the macabre genius of Poe.

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  Man Overboard - A Jesse...

  Wayne Stinnett

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  Jesse McDermitt has returned to the Florida Keys. But things in the islands are different now. The locals are worried, but nobody can explain why. A sense of foreboding hangs in the humid July air. 
  One of the locals, an investment banker, is waiting tables at the Rusty Anchor Bar and Grill. He seems a shell of the man he used to be—a hollow man whose fortune and wife are gone. He’s tight-lipped about how he came to be a guest in Rufus’s little shack behind the bar. 
  Something very sinister is going on—Jesse smells it. He’s usually very good at rooting out the source of a problem, but is stumped this time. 
  Until another tight-lipped hollow man shows up.

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  A Dead Secret - From their pens...

  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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