Other books that might interest you

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  Four Stories

  Matthew Wayne Selznick

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  The first short story collection from Matthew Wayne Selznick focuses on revelations of clarity and epiphanies of character in the face of emotional challenges. 
   
  	Also included are brief essays exploring the formative experiences and memories that inspired each short story, making this collection Matthew Wayne Selznick's most personal creative work to date. 
   The Stories: 
   
  	The collection opens with “You Got Me,” wherein the way two people each deal with one particularly rough day might have a lot to do with how they spend their days to come. 
   
  	Next, a musician struggles with expectations and understanding when he travels far from home with his new band for “Gig Number Two.” 
   
  	In the third story, he says it’s “Not My Fault,” but his girlfriend is convinced his distractions will drive them apart. Then comes the most unexpected distraction of all... 
   
  	The final story, “The Days of Wine and Roses by The Dream Syndicate,” provides a mental soundtrack for a reluctant walk through memory and pain on the way to save a troubled damsel in distress one last time. 
   
  	Each of the "Four Stories" explore universal themes of responsibility, relationships, honesty, and how we define character.

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  A Collection of Classic Short...

  Various Authors

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  An entertaining selection of short stories including tales by renowned storytellers O' Henry, George Eliot and Saki.

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  My Distant Relative - Short...

  John Galsworthy

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  John Galsworthy was born on the 14th August 1867 on the family estate, Parkfield, in Kingston-upon-Thames.  His family’s wealth came from the shipping industry 
  At age nine he began his education at Saugeen, a Bournemouth preparatory school, before moving to Harrow school in 1881, distinguishing himself as an athlete.  
  Galsworthy attended New College, Oxford to read law and left with a second-class degree with honours in 1889. The bar called him in 1890 but Galsworthy decided he would rather run the family’s shipping business. This also meant travelling to destinations such as Vancouver, South Africa and Australia. 
  In 1895 Galsworthy began a decade long affair with Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper, the wife of his first cousin. It was only when, in 1905, she divorced and married Galsworthy that their affair became known. 
  His literary career began in 1897 with a short story volume, ‘From the Four Winds’, with the pseudonym John Sinjohn as were three further works. Under his own name, in 1904, came ‘The Island Pharisees’, a novel of social observation, seasoned with flashes of satire and propaganda. He also switched from small, independent publishers to the larger Heinemann and to whom he remained for the duration of his career. 
  1906 saw first major play, ‘The Silver Box’, and the novel ‘The Man of Property’. Each to considerable acclaim. The latter was the first in ‘The Forsyte Saga’ trilogy written between 1906 and 1921. It dealt with the questions of status, class and materialism through Soames Forsyte, who is acutely aware of his ‘new money’ status. Jealous of his wife, his machinations drive her into the arms of another. Soames engages in a terrible revenge with terrible consequences.  
  His social agenda was enlightened particularly in his condemnation over the use of solitary confinement in prisons, his attacks on theatrical censorship and campaigning for animal rights. 
  Galsworthy, having been passed over for active service, spent much of the First World War working as an orderly in a field hospital in France. 
  Despite his it was only in 1920 that he had his first blockbuster play ‘The Skin Game’, a melodrama dealing with ethics, property and class.  
  In 1920 ‘In Chancery’ also arrived with further discourse on the marital disharmony between Soames Forsyte and his wife.  
  The appreciation of his work gradually shifted from plays to novels, particularly through his detailing English social difference, tension and pretension with the Forsytes.  A second trilogy, ‘A Modern Comedy’, followed, examining his love for his daughter Fleur and the English commercial upper-middle class, its ideologies and Soames’ poisonous materialism.  
  Having rejected a knighthood in 1918 he was appointed, in 1929, to the Order of Merit. Galsworthy spent his last years writing a third Forsythe trilogy, ‘End of the Chapter’.   
  In 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, but by now failing health meant he was too ill to attend the ceremony. 
  John Galsworthy died at his Hampstead home of a brain tumour on 31st January, 1933. He was cremated and his ashes scattered from an aeroplane over the South Downs.

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  A Trip to the Other World - From...

  Kálmán Mikszáth

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  The bookshelves of World literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors.  From their countries and continents their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure.  Among them is Kálmán Mikszáth.

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  The Striding Place - From their...

  Gertrude Atherton

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  Gertrude Franklin Horn was born on October 30th, 1857, in San Francisco, California. Her parents separated in 1860 when she was two years old, and she was raised by her maternal grandfather, Stephen Franklin, a devout Presbyterian. He insisted she be well read, and was a great influence on her.  
  She attended St. Mary's Hall high school in Benicia, California, and, briefly, the Sayre School in Lexington, Kentucky. 
  In Kentucky, the rebellious Gertrude met George H.B. Atherton, who was courting her mother. His attentions wandered to Gertrude and, after she accepted his sixth proposal, they eloped on February 15th, 1876.  
  She went to live with him and his domineering Chilean mother. Gertrude found life stultifying. As a result of her disappointment she began to develop an independent life. But two tragedies changed her life dramatically: her son George died of diphtheria, and her husband died at sea. She was left with their daughter Muriel but and needed to support herself. Her mother-in-law agreed to raise Muriel. 
  Her first publication was ‘The Randolphs of Redwood: A Romance’, and serialised in The Argonaut in 1882. When she told her family, she was ostracized.  
  Gertrude’s first novel, ‘What Dreams May Come’, was published in 1888 under the pseudonym Frank Lin. 
  With the death of her grandfather and her mother-in-law she returned to California to resume care of Muriel. In 1891, while writing a weekly column for The San Francisco Examiner, she met Ambrose Bierce, with whom she carried on a love-hate relationship. 
  She wrote ‘Doomswoman’ in 1892, it was published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine and as a book in 1893. The story focuses on Chonita Moncada y Iturbi and her love of Diego Estenega, as he dreams of modernizing California.  
  In 1892, Atherton left for New York to write for the New York World. She wrote letters to Bierce, confiding her loneliness, her dismay at freelance writing and her dislike of eastern literary circles. Whilst there though she published another California novel, ‘Before the Gringo Came’ (1894). 
  Following this was ‘Patience Sparhawk and Her Times’ (1897), but it proved to be controversial. Its rejection encouraged her to leave for London.  
  In 1898, she completed ‘The Californians’, her first novel set in the post-Spanish era. Critics received this much more positively: The Spectator said "The novel fairly establishes her claim to be considered as one of the most vivid and entertaining interpreters of the complex characters of emancipated American womanhood."  
  Further works followed, many from her California series dealing with the social history of California.  
  Gertrude wrote several stories of supernatural horror, including ‘Death and the Woman’, and ‘Crowned with One Crest’, as well as ‘The Foghorn’, and the much anthologised ‘The Striding Place’.  
  She was an early feminist well acquainted with the plight of women although she spoke against its militancy. Add to this her strong-will, independent-mind, and sometimes her oversteps into controversy, especially over anti-communism and its easy to identify why her novels had such sharp and strong characters. 
  Gertrude Atherton died on June 14th, 1948. She is buried in Cypress Lawn cemetery in Colma, California.

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  Acquired Taste - Chilling Stories

  Clay McLeod Chapman

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  They’re feeding on you too. 
    
  A father returns from serving in Vietnam with a strange and terrifying addiction; a man removes something horrifying from his fireplace, and becomes desperate to return it; and a right-wing news channel has its hooks in people in more ways than one.  
    
  From department store Santas to ghost boyfriends and salamander-worshipping nuns, from the claustrophobia of the COVID-19 pandemic to small-town Chesapeake USA, Clay McLeod Chapman takes universal fears of parenthood, addiction and political divisions and makes them uniquely his own.  
    
  Packed full of humanity, humour and, above all, relentless creeping dread, Acquired Taste is a timely descent into the mind of one of modern horror’s finest authors.

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