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  Female Short Story The - A...

  Vernon Lee, Edith Nesbit,...

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  A wise man once said ‘The safest place for a child is in the arms of his mother’s voice’.  This is a perfect place to start our anthology of female short stories. 
   
  Some of our earliest memories are of our mothers telling us bedtime stories. This is not to demote the value of fathers but more to promote the often-overshadowed talents of the gentler sex. 
   
  Perhaps ‘gentler’ is a word that we should re-evaluate. In the course of literary history it is men who dominated by opportunity and with their stranglehold on the resources, both financial and technological, who brought their words to a wider audience.  Men often placed women on a pedestal from where their talented words would not threaten their own.   
   
  In these stories we begin with the original disrupter and renegade author Aphra Behn.  A peek at her c.v. shows an astounding capacity and leaves us wondering at just how she did all that. 
   
  In those less modern days to be a woman, even ennobled, was to be seen as second class.  You literally were chattel and had almost no rights in marriage.  As Charlotte Smith famously said your role as wife was little more than ‘legal prostitute’.  From such a despicable place these authors have used their talents and ideas and helped redress that situation.   
   
  Slowly at first.  Privately printed, often anonymously or under the cloak of a male pseudonym their words spread.  Their stories admired and, usually, their role still obscured from rightful acknowledgement. 
   
  Aided by more advanced technology, the 1700’s began to see a steady stream of female writers until by the 1900’s mass market publishing saw short stories by female authors from all the strata of society being avidly read by everyone.  Their names are a rollcall of talent and ‘can do’ spirit and society is richer for their works.   
   
  In literature at least women are now acknowledged as equals, true behind the scenes little has changed but if (and to mis-quote Jane Austen) there is one universal truth, it is that ideas change society.  These women’s most certainly did and will continue to do so as they easily write across genres, from horror and ghost stories to tender tales of love and making your way in society’s often grueling rut.  They will not be silenced, their ideas and passion move emotions, thoughts and perhaps more importantly our ingrained view of what every individual human being is capable of.    
   
  It is because of their desire to speak out, their desire to add their talents to the bias around them that we perhaps live in more enlightened, almost equal, times.   
   
  Within these stories you will also find very occasional examples of historical prejudice.  A few words here and there which in today’s world some may find inappropriate or even offensive.  It is not our intention to make anyone uncomfortable but to show that the world in order to change must reconcile itself to the actual truth rather than put it out of sight.  Context is everything, both to understand and to illuminate the path forward.  The author’s words are set, our reaction to them encourages our change. 
   
  01 - The Female Short Story. A Chronological History - An Introduction - Volume 5 
  02 - The Death Mask by H D Everett writing as Theo Parker 
  03 - The Story of 'The Spaniards', Hammersmith by Kate and Hesketh Pritchard 
  04 - A New England Nun by Mary E Wilkins Freeman 
  05 - A Dream of Wild Bees by Olive Schreiner 
  06 - The Hired Baby, A Romance of the London Streets by Mary Mackay writing as Marie Corelli 
  07 - The Runaway by Marion Hepworth-Dixon 
  08 - Amour Dure by Violet Paget writing as Vernon Lee 
  09 - My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon writing as Margaret Wynham 
  10 - Irremediable by Ella D'Arcy 
  11 - When the Devil Was Well by Gertrude Ather

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  Wilderness - A Journal of Quiet...

  Rockwell Kent

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  The artist and adventurer chronicles his seven-month excursion to a remote cabin on Alaska’s Fox Island with his nine-year-old son. In August 1918 Rockwell Kent and his nine-year-old son settled into a primitive cabin on an island near Seward, Alaska. Kent, who during the next three decades became America’s premier graphic artist, printmaker, and illustrator, was seeking time, peace, and solitude to work on his art and strengthen ties with his son. This reissue of the journal chronicling their seven-month odyssey describes what Kent called “an adventure of the spirit.” He soon discovers how deeply he is “stirred by simple happenings in a quiet world” as man and boy face both the mundane and the magnificent: satisfaction in simple chores like woodchopping or baking; the appalling gloom of long and lonely winter nights; hours of silence while each works at his drawings; crystalline moonlight glancing off a frozen lake; killer whales cavorting in their bay. Richly illustrated by Kent’s drawings, the journal vividly re-creates that sense of great height and space—both external and internal—at the same time that it celebrates a wilderness now nearly lost to us.Including Extensive Hitherto Unpublished Passages from the Original Journal.“Twenty-nine years after his death, [Rockwell] Kent has returned with a vengeance. Not since the height of his pre-McCarthyism popularity has so much of his work been available to the public.” —Scott Ferris, Smithsonian“Conservationists and ecologists should rejoice at the reappearance of this splendid diary telling of the winter of 1918-1919, during which the late Rockwell Kent and his nine-year-old son exulted in the beauties of Alaska’s remote Fox Island. Kent’s strong woodcuts and sketches perfectly complement an unaffected text that tells in an authentic and most effective way of unspoiled nature in all its glory. . . . This book has considerable merit as an account of rugged life in Alaska, as a paean to the glories of nature, and as a record of Kent’s graphic work.” —Library Journal

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  Wild Dances - My Queer and...

  William Lee Adams

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  As a boy, William Lee Adams spent his days taking care of his quadriplegic brother, while worrying about his undiagnosed bipolar Vietnamese mother, and steering clear of his openly racist and homophobic father. Too shy and anxious to even speak until he was six years old, it seemed unlikely William would ever leave small-town Georgia.In time, William discovered that learning was both a refuge and a ticket out. So even as he struggled to understand and to get others to accept both his sexuality and his biracial identity, William focused on his schoolwork, his extracurricular activities, and building community with the students and teachers who embraced him for who he truly was. Though his scholarship to Harvard parachuted him into a whole new world, he still carried a lifetime of secrets and unanswered questions that would haunt him no matter how far he traveled.Years later, as a journalist in London, William discovered the Eurovision Song Contest—an annual competition known for its extravagant performers and cutthroat politics. Initially just a fan, he started blogging about the contest, ultimately becoming the most sought-after expert on the subject. William was soon jetting across the continent to meet divas, drag queens, and aspiring singers, who welcomed him to their beautiful, if dysfunctional, family of choice.

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  Dadland

  Keggie Carew

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  As her father’s memory fails, a daughter explores his military past: “Part family memoir, part history book . . . Compelling and moving from start to finish” (Financial Times).   One of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ten Best Books of the Year   For most of Keggie Carew’s life, she was kept at arm’s length from her father’s personal history. But when she is invited to join him for the sixtieth anniversary of the Jedburghs—an elite special operations unit that was the first collaboration between the American and British Secret Services during World War II—a new door opens in their relationship. As dementia begins to stake a claim over Tom Carew’s memory, Keggie embarks on a quest to unravel his story, and soon finds herself in a far more consuming place than she bargained for.   Tom Carew was a maverick, a left-handed stutterer, a law unto himself. As a Jedburgh he parachuted behind enemy lines to raise guerrilla resistance first against the Germans in France, then against the Japanese in Southeast Asia, where he won the nickname “Lawrence of Burma.” But his wartime exploits were only the beginning. A winner of the Costa Book Award, Dadland takes us on a journey through peace and war and shady corners of twentieth-century politics; though the author’s English childhood and the breakdown of her family, and into the mysterious realm of memory.   “Brings to mind Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk in the way it soars off in surprising directions, teaches you things you didn’t know, and ambushes your emotions.” ―NPR   “Astonishing . . . Mixes intimate memoir, biography, history and detective story: this is a shape-shifting hybrid that meditates on the nature of time and identity . . . Tom Carew was a razzle-dazzle character, larger than life and anarchically self-invented . . . For all its vigor and comic zest, Dadland is a careful and tender discovery that patiently circles around a man who spent his life mythologizing and running away from himself.” ―The Observer

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  Uncanny Valley - A Memoir

  Anna Wiener

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  The prescient account of a journey in Silicon Valley: a defining memoir of our digital ageIn her mid-20s, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener — stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial — left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress.Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building.Part coming-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment.Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.

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  At All Costs

  Davy Fitzgerald, Vincent Hogan

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  Davy Fitzgerald is one of hurling's defining personalities. A two-time All-Ireland winner as a player and once as a manager, he has spent the past decade consolidating a reputation as one of the most innovative and dynamic coaches in the game, first with Waterford, then with his native Clare and, most recently, with Wexford.For Davy, however, exacting in his standards and possessed of an unshakeable will to succeed, victory has always come at a cost. His playing and managerial honours, though formidable, are matched by a roll call of public controversies and private challenges every bit as lengthy and varied.In this, a raw and forthright account of his time in management, Fitzgerald returns to the moments that have defined his career to date – the tactics and gambles, the breakthroughs and regrets, the friendships and fallings out – all the while measuring his judgement and the toll his single-minded pursuit of excellence has taken on his health and those closest to him.Packed with insights and anecdotes from his time on the sidelines, At All Costs is a riveting account of a career spent walking the fine line that separates commitment from obsession, and a must read for anyone who has ever wondered what it takes to compete – and succeed – at the highest level.

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