Other books that might interest you

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  Benediction - From their pens to...

  F Scott itzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack.

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  The Mirror of the Sea

  Joseph Conrad

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  "Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of passages, the growing sense of solitude, the close dependence upon the very forces that, friendly to-day, without changing their nature, by the mere putting forth of their might, become dangerous to-morrow, make for that sense of fellowship which modern seamen, good men as they are, cannot hope to know." In this volume of essays, more than in any other single work, we get to see clearly just what Joseph Conrad's years working on sail-powered ships meant to him — and they certainly meant a great deal to him, for all Conrad's subsequent fretting that he might be typed as "only" a writer of the sea. This collection is particularly renowned for the lengthy episode titled "The Tremolino", where Conrad gives us, in the character of the real-world Dominic, the model of his fictional Nostromo, as well as an account of personalities and gun-running activities he would later depict in "The Arrow of Gold".

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  Coconut Dreams

  Derek Mascarenhas

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  Coconut Dreams explores the lives of the Pinto family through seventeen linked short stories. Starting with a ghost story set in Goa, India, in the 1950s, the collection weaves through various timelines and perspectives to focus on siblings Aiden and Ally Pinto and their experience of growing up in a predominantly white suburb with innocence, intelligence, and a timid foot in two distinct cultures.
  Here, Derek Mascarenhas takes a fresh look at the world of the new immigrant and the South Asian experience in Canada. A daughter questions her father's love at an IKEA grand opening; an aunt remembers a safari-gone-wrong in Kenya; an uncle's unrequited love is confronted at a Goan Association picnic; a boy tests his faith amidst a school-yard brawl; and a childhood love letter is exchanged during the building of a backyard deck. Singularly and collectively, these stories will move the reader with their engaging narratives and authentic voices.

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  Evil Flowers

  Gunnhild Øyehaug, Kari Dickson -...

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  From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Present Tense Machine and Knots, a collection of playfully surreal stories about love, death, and metamorphosis. 
   
  In Evil Flowers, a precise but madcap collection of short stories, Gunnhild Øyehaug extracts the bizarre from the mundane and reveals the strange, startling brilliance of everyday life. 
   
  Across twenty-five stories, Øyehaug renovates the form again and again, confirming Lydia Davis’s observation that her every story is “a formal surprise, smart and droll.” The stories converse with, contradict, and expand on one another; birds, hagfish, and wild beasts reappear, gnawing at the fringes. A section of a woman’s brain slips into the toilet bowl, removing her ability to remember or recognize types of birds (particularly problematic because she is an ornithologist). Medicinal leeches ingest information from fiberoptic cables, and a new museum sinks into the ground. 
   
  Inspired by Charles Baudelaire, a dreamer and romantic in the era of realism, Øyehaug revolts against the ordinary, reaching instead for the wonder to be found in fantasy and absurdity. Brimming with wit, ingenuity, and irrepressible joy, these stories mark another triumph from a dazzling international writer.

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  Lolita at Leonard's of Great...

  Shira Dicker

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  Rich with authentic detail and insight, these compelling stories sweep the reader along on an intimate, uniquely Jewish journey from 1974 through the first decade of the new millennium as the characters wrestle with identity, independence, ambition, sexuality, faith, and love. 
   
  The five compelling tales comprising Lolita at Leonard’s of Great Neck and Other Stories from the Before Times will take you on an immersive journey from 1974 to the 2000s. Eighteen-year-old Anna, a Jewish college student, meets a German businessman at a Greek diner on Queens Boulevard. Claire Seltzer of Great Neck has the honeymoon from hell in Paris. Rebecca, a spunky eighth grader, is in love with Mr. Miller, her math teacher. Sarah Reinhardt, the wife of a celebrity doctor living in Central Park West, finds herself in a complicated love triangle. Rachel Rosensweig awakens one morning to find that her husband of thirty years, a Columbia professor, has become a dangerous radical. 
   
  The characters of this unforgettable collection inhabit the golden era of the postwar, pre-pandemic world. Age-old power struggles—between lovers, between friends, between parents and children—are illuminated and analyzed.  
   
  Heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious, their stories disclose and document what it meant to be American, Jewish, and female. Rich with cultural touchstones and reference points, they are suffused with self-awareness, longing, and sensual awareness. 
   
  Will Anna accept the invitation of the German businessman? Can Claire’s honeymoon be saved? Will Rebecca’s love for Mr. Miller remain secret? How will Sarah fix the mess she has made? And how will Rachel protect herself from the threat that has suddenly become very personal? 
   
  You are invited to fall in love with these characters and their long-gone world.

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  Louisa Baldwin - A Short Story...

  Louisa Baldwin

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  Louisa MacDonald was born in 1845, one of eleven children of part Scottish descent.  Together with three of her sisters they were known as the ‘MacDonald sisters’ primarily because of their marriages to well-known men.   
   
  In 1866 she married the wealthy industrialist Alfred Baldwin in a double wedding with her sister Anne.   
   
  After giving birth to Stanley on the 3rd August 1867, who would go on to become Prime Minister, she drifted into an unhappy life in her then residence in Worcestershire.  She had at least one miscarriage and days alone depressed and in darkness. 
   
  During the 1870’s the couple travelled to find a lasting cure and tried a variety of treatments which led to her recovery in 1883.  She now became a leading figure in her local village of Wilden, near Stourbridge. 
   
  Her writing career of novels, short stories and poetry is often overlooked, as was the case with so many women, yet her works reveal many talents and a gift for melding odd and weird circumstances into seemingly everyday life.   
   
  Louisa Baldwin died in 1925. 
   
  1 - Louisa Baldwin - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  2 - The Empty Picture Frame by Louisa Baldwin 
  3 - The Shadow on the Blind by Louisa Baldwin 
  4 - The Weird of the Walfords by Louisa Baldwin 
  5 - Many Waters Cannot Quench Love by Louisa Baldwin 
  6 - My Next Door Neighbour by Louisa Baldwin

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