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  In Bayswater - One family is...

  Mary Butts

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  Mary Frances Butts was born on 13th December 1890 in Poole, Dorset. 
   
  Her early years were spent at Salterns, an 18th-century house overlooking Poole Harbour.  Sadly in 1905 her father died, and she was sent for boarding at St Leonard's school for girls in St Andrews. 
   
  Her mother remarried and, from 1909, Mary studied at Westfield College in London, and here, first became aware of her bisexual feelings.  She was sent down for organising a trip to Epsom races and only completed her degree in 1914 when she graduated from the London School of Economics.  By then Mary had become an admirer of the occultist Aleister Crowley and she was given a co-authorship credit on his ‘Magick (Book 4)’. 
   
  In 1916, she began the diary which would now detail her future life and be a constant reference point for her observations and her absorbing experiences. 
   
  During World War I, she was doing social work for the London County Council in Hackney Wick, and involved in a lesbian relationship.  Life changed after meeting the modernist poet, John Rodker and they married in 1918. 
   
  In 1921 she spent 3 months at Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Sicily; she found the practices dreadful and also acquired a drug habit.  Mary now spent time writing in Dorset, including her celebrated book of short stories ‘Speed the Plough’ which saw fully develop her unique Modernist prose style. 
   
  Europe now beckoned and several years were spent in Paris befriending many artists and writing further extraordinary stories.   
   
  She was continually sought after by literary magazines and also published several short story collections as books. Although a Modernist writer she worked in other genres but is essentially only known for her short stories.  Mary was deeply committed to nature conservation and wrote several pamphlets attacking the growing pollution of the countryside. 
   
  In 1927, she divorced and the following year her novel ‘Armed with Madness’ was published.  A further marriage followed in 1930 and time was spent attempting to settle in London and Newcastle before setting up home on the western tip of Cornwall.  By 1934 the marriage had failed. 
   
  Mary Butts died on 5th March 1937, at the West Cornwall Hospital, Penzance, after an operation for a perforated gastric ulcer. She was 46. 
   
  Her story ‘In Bayswater’ grippingly describes a man’s friendship with a dysfunctional family he rents a room from.  As each facet reveals itself his opinion and decisions change, back and forth, this way and that….

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  Dark to Light and Other Stories

  Stephen Filbey

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  Life thwarts Floyd’s goals sooner or later. A rival challenges his new invention. His buried gold is confiscated by HM Treasury. He is wrongly charged with arson. He is unfairly dismissed. He campaigns to change part of English punctuation, yet inadvertently continues to use it afterwards. Helping a friend lands him in hospital. What has he done to deserve all this? 
  Yet he is resourceful in dealing with his adverse situations, whether personal or confronting the might of the state. Other characters must eat humble pie to stay afloat. College lecturer Ed Beck forsakes his principles. And Matt abandons his business dreams to preserve an old friendship.

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Charles Dickens

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  In this Century Men still control almost all of ‘who’ and ‘what’ gets published.  It is an unfair world but these male authors are also very gifted and none could argue with their status here.  Their stories throw light onto the ills and dark corners of societies flaws and the damning rules that oppress the many. 
   
  01 - The Top 10 - The 19th Century - The Men - An Introduction 
  2 - The Signalman by Charles Dickens 
  3 - Bartleby the Scrivener - Part 1 by Herman Melville 
  4 - Bartleby the Scrivener - Part 2 by Herman Melville 
  5 - The Cloak by Nikolai Gogol also known as 'The Overcoat' 
  6 - The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant 
  7 - About Love by Anton Chekhov 
  8 - The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe 
  9 - The District Doctor by Ivan Turgenev 
  10 - Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  11 - A Passion in the Desert by Honoré de Balzac 
  12 - Lost Hearts by M R James

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  Ezra’s Ghosts

  Darcy Tamayose

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  Award-winning author Darcy Tamayose returns with Ezra’s Ghosts, a collection of fantastical stories linked by a complex mingling of language and culture, as well as a deep understanding of grief and what it makes of us. Within these pages a scholar writes home from the Ryukyu islands, not knowing that his hometown will soon face a deadly calamity of its own. Another seeker of truth is trapped in Ezra after her violent death, and must watch how her family—and her killer—alter in her absence. The oldest man in town, an immigrant who came to Canada to escape imperial hardships, sprouts wings, and a wounded journalist bears witness to his transformation. Finally, past and present collide as a researcher reflects on the recent skinwars that have completely altered the world’s topography. Binding the stories together is an intersect of arrival and departure—in a quiet prairie town called Ezra.

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  The Short Stories of Henry W...

  Henry W. Nevinson

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  Henry Woodd Nevinson was born on October 11th, 1856. 
  Nevinson was schooled at Shrewsbury School and at Christ Church, Oxford. John Ruskin influenced his time at Oxford. Fascinated by German Culture he spent some time at Jena before publishing, in 1884, Herder & His times, a study on Johnann Gottfried Herder. 
  In 1897 he became the Daily Chronicle's reporter for the Greco-Turkish War. He was also noted for his reporting on the Second Boer War. 
  During the 1880s Nevinson had attached his politics to Socialism and by 1889 had joined the Social Democratic Federation. 
  In 1904, he was hired by Harper's Monthly Magazine to report on a supposed trade in slaves from Angola to the cocoa plantations of São Tomé. He produced evidence of people being trafficked to settle debts or seized by Portuguese agents and taken in shackles to the coastal towns. Once there he wrote that Portuguese officials "freed" them and continued the charade by declaring they were now voluntary workers who agreed to go to São Tomé for five years. Despite severe ill health he continued to follow the slaves to São Tomé. He found plantation conditions so appalling that one in five workers died each year. His account was serialised from August 1905 and then published as ‘A Modern Slavery’ in 1906. 
  He was also a suffragist, being one of the founders in 1907 of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage. 
  In 1914 he co-founded the Friends' Ambulance Unit and later in World War I, as a war correspondent, was wounded during the infamous Gallipoli campaign. 
  E. M. Forster described Nevinson's book, ‘More Changes, More Chances’ in 1925 as "exciting", and that "He has brought to the soil of his adoption something that transcends party-generosity, recklessness, a belief in conscience joined to a mistrust of principles". 
  A committed Socialist Nevinson could see, during the 20s and 30s, the foundations of a titanic struggle began to gather its forces. He would later state "I detest the cruel systems of persecution and suppression now existing under Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and Stalin in Russia". 
  Nevinson married Margaret Wynne Jones and, after her death in 1933, he married his long-time lover, and fellow suffragist, Evelyn Sharp. 
  Henry W. Nevinson died on November 9th, 1941. 
   
  01 - Henry W. Nevinson. A Short Story Volume - An Introduction 
  02 - St George of Rochester by Henry W. Nevinson 
  03 - The Aristocrat of Labour by Henry W. Nevinson

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  Secret Sex - An Anthology

  Russell Smith

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  New risky fiction—with no names attached. 
   
   
   
  If authors could write their sex scenes anonymously, would they be less reticent? Would they include the stuff they didn't want their mom, or the newspapers, to read? 
   
   
   
  Here are twenty-four original short pieces of fiction on the theme of sex, by twenty-four prominent authors living in Canada. Heather O'Neill, Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, Zoe Whittall, Pasha Malla, francesca ekwuyasi, Drew Hayden Taylor, Tamara Faith Berger, and Susan Swan are among these. But we won't tell you who wrote what. 
   
   
   
  The pieces are uncensored, unpredictable; they veer from graphic to subtle to surreal. There is straight sex and gay sex. There is frustrated sex. There is sex that happens entirely through text messages. Secret Sex is a book of erotic imaginings by some of Canada's most sophisticated and respected writers, working in total freedom, secretly. 
   
   
   
  Contains mature themes.

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