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  Pleasure Palace - New and...

  Marian Thurm

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  Short fiction filled with both warmth and dark wit by a writer who “embraces the ironies and the absurdities of the ordinary world” (Newsday).   At the age of twenty-five, Marian Thurm began publishing short stories in the New Yorker, and over a remarkable career, her work has been compared to the short fiction of Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, and Amy Bloom. Known for her uncanny sense of the absurd along with her empathy for her characters, Thurm’s acclaimed writing has been featured in The Best American Short Stories, as well as numerous other anthologies. This volume, selected from her four collections—with stories written over a span of forty-two years—shows Thurm’s remarkable craft, never failing to reveal both her emotional acuity and her pitch-dark humor.   “Marian Thurm is either a movingly compassionate observer of human foibles or a charmingly ruthless one.” —The New York Times Book Review

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  The Short Stories of William...

  William Pett Ridge

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  William Pett Ridge was born at Chartham, near Canterbury, Kent, on 22nd April 1859. 
   
  His family’s resources were certainly limited. His father was a railway porter, and the young Pett Ridge, after schooling in Marden, Kent became a clerk in a railway clearing-house. The hours were long and arduous, but self-improvement was Pett Ridge’s goal.  After working from nine until seven o’clock he would attend evening classes at Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institute and then to follow his passion; the ambition to write.  He was heavily influenced by Dickens and several critics thought he had the capability to be his successor. 
   
  From 1891 many of his humorous sketches were published in the St James's Gazette, the Idler, Windsor Magazine and other literary periodicals of the day. 
   
  Pett Ridge published his first novel in 1895, A Clever Wife. By the advent of his fifth novel, Mord Em'ly, a mere three years later in 1898, his success was obvious.  His writing was written from the perspective of those born with no privilege and relied on his great talent to find humor and sympathy in his portrayal of working class life. 
   
  Today Pett Ridge and other East End novelists including Arthur Nevinson, Arthur Morrison, and Edwin Pugh are being grouped together as the Cockney Novelists.   
   
  In 1924, Pugh set out his recollections of Pett Ridge from the 1890s: “I see him most clearly, as he was in those days, through a blue haze of tobacco smoke. We used sometimes to travel together from Waterloo to Worcester Park on our way to spend a Saturday afternoon and evening with H. G. Wells. Pett Ridge does not know it, but it was through watching him fill his pipe, as he sat opposite me in a stuffy little railway compartment, that I completed my own education as a smoker”. 
   
  With his success, on the back of his prolific output and commercial success, Pett Ridge gave generously of both time and money to charity. In 1907 he founded the Babies Home at Hoxton.  This was one of several organizations that he supported that had the welfare of children as their mission.  
   
  His circle considered Pett Ridge to be one of life's natural bachelors. In 1909 they were rather surprised therefore when he married Olga Hentschel.  
   
  As the 1920s arrived Pett Ridge added to his popularity with the movies. Four of his books were adapted into films.  
   
  Pett Ridge now found the peak of his fame had passed. Although he still managed to produce a book a year he was falling out of fashion and favor with the reading public and his popularity declined rapidly.  His canon runs to over sixty novels and short-story collections as well as many pieces for magazines and periodicals. 
   
  William Pett Ridge died, on 29th September 1930, at his home, Ampthill, Willow Grove, Chislehurst, at the age of 71. 
   
  He was cremated at West Norwood on 2nd October 1930.

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  Theatre Royal - Lord Saville's...

  Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson

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  Theatre Royal. The very name summons up something of grandeur and eloquence. And it was. Hosted by Laurence Olivier, these big-name productions also included the creme de la creme of acting talents from John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Orson Welles to Trevor Howard, Michael Redgrave and Olivier himself. They were based on works by the worlds’ leading authors, among them Charles Dickens, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov.  These are but a few of whose company we shall be keeping as we raise the curtain on our first instalment of theatrical history.

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  The Roman Road

  Kenneth Grahame

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  All roads lead to Rome. The young boy telling this story cannot quite comprehend this assertion - but of one road, he is certain it is true. The Knights' Road, as he and his friends call it. A road without hedges or ditches, a road that heads straight over the downs with a purpose. One day he will set off to Rome along this road... but for the moment his attention is arrested by an artist he meets on the Knights' Road. An artist who seems to know many strange and wonderful things...

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  The Three Musketeers

  Alexandre Dumas

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  One of the most celebrated and popular historical romances ever written, "The Three Musketeers" tells the story of the early adventures of the young Gascon gentleman, D'Artagnan and his three friends from the regiment of the King's Musketeers - Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Under the watchful eye of their patron M. de Treville, the four defend the honour of the regiment against the guards of Cardinal Richelieu, and the honour of the queen against the machinations of the Cardinal himself as the power struggles of seventeenth century France are vividly played out in the background. But their most dangerous encounter is with the Cardinal's spy, Milady, one of literature's most memorable female villains, and Alexandre Dumas employs all his fast-paced narrative skills to bring this enthralling novel to a breathtakingly gripping and dramatic conclusion.

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  The Lone Ranger and Tonto...

  Sherman Alexie

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  Sherman Alexie’s darkly humorous story collection weaves memory, fantasy, and stark reality to powerfully evoke life on the Spokane Indian Reservation.  The twenty-four linked tales in Alexie’s debut collection—an instant classic—paint an unforgettable portrait of life on and around the Spokane Indian Reservation, a place where “Survival = Anger x Imagination,” where HUD houses and generations of privation intertwine with history, passion, and myth.   We follow Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the longwinded storyteller no one really listens to; his half-hearted nemesis, Victor, the basketball star turned recovering alcoholic; and a wide cast of other vividly drawn characters on a haunting journey filled with humor and sorrow, resilience and resignation, dreams and reality. Alexie’s unadulterated honesty and boundless compassion come together in a poetic vision of a world in which the gaps between past and present are not really gaps after all.   The basis for the acclaimed 1998 feature film Smoke Signals,the Chicago Tribune noted, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven . . . is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940.”   The collection received a Special Citation for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction.   This ebook edition features a new prologue from the author, as well as an illustrated biography and rare photos from Sherman Alexie’s personal collection.  

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