Publisher: Tami Veldura
A deadly blight sweeps across the land, driving people and animal alike before it. Two sisters flee from the overtaking poison, ready to fight for their lives and each other. The Art of Magic is a short story about power, where it comes from, what we can do to change its course, and how the acts we perform every day can stop the unstoppable.
A young girl frantically summons a gentleman walking by on the street to come in and help her grandfather. Arthur Outhwaite answers her cry for help only to find himself as the last person to see her grandfather alive and left with the admonishment from the dying man to deliver a letter to someone, and to that person only. Unfortunately, he dies before he can inform Outhwaite who that particular person is. Being in a house of strangers, Outhwaite is thrust into the mystery of not only finding this unknown person, but is also faced with the mysterious circumstances under which the child's grandfather died. (Summary by Laura Victoria)Show book
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. "Carnation" is the evocative story of a French class in a girls' school, teenage hormones and daydreams, a heatwave, a teacher with an embarrassing penchant for romantic poetry ... and a carnation...Show book
'The Miner at Home ' was written by D H Lawrence in 1912. Lawrence is at his best in this story, taken from the scenes of his childhood and based on characters he knew intimately. The scene can hardly be called a story in the traditional sense, being the altercation between a miner and his wife over an impending strike but as a picture of a working miner’s family, rich in detail and the Nottinghamshire dialect, it has a fascination and vividness.Show book
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) began writing when he was stationed in the Caucasus in the Russian army. After fighting in the Crimean war, he settled in St. Petersburg, where he wrote a number of stories which reveal an increasing disillusionment with society and the military. "The Empty Drum" is an antiwar story adapted from a Russian folk tale.Show book
A New York Times Editors’ Choice short story collection hailed as “a fresh masterpiece of Southern fiction . . . touching, haunting and brilliant” (Dallas News). Long considered a master of the form and an essential voice in American fiction, Michael Knight delivers a “deft and wonderful, wholly original” collection of interlinked stories set among the members of a Mobile, Alabama family in the years preceding a devastating hurricane (The New York Times Book Review). Grappling with dramas both epic and personal, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the “unspeakable misgivings of contentment,” Eveningland captures with perfect authenticity of place the ways in which ordinary life astounds us with its complexity. A teenaged girl with a taste for violence holds a burglar hostage in her house on New Year’s Eve; a middle-aged couple examines the intricacies of their marriage as they prepare to throw a party; and a real estate mogul in the throes of grief buys up all the property on an island only to be accused of madness by his daughters. These stories, infused with humor and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward in “a luminous collection from a writer of the first rank” (Esquire).Show book
Barbara, a young and impetuous heiress, rejects the stern Lord Uplandtowers to elope with a poor but handsome man, Edmund Willowes. When Barbara’s parents send Edmund to Europe, they hope to change him into a more suitable match for their daughter. But after disaster strikes, Edmund returns in a way nobody could have imagined.Show book
