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  3 Stories About - Life &...

  F Scott itzgerald, Bret Harte,...

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  There is something about the number 3.    
   
  The Ancient Greeks believed 3 was the perfect number, and in China 3 has always been a lucky number, and they know a thing or two.   
   
  Most religions also have 3 this and 3 that and, of course, in these more modern times, three’s a crowd may be too many, except when it’s a ménage à trois.  It seems good things usually come in threes. 
   
  Whatever history and culture says WE think 3, a hat-trick of stories, is a great number to explore themes and literary avenues that classic authors were so adept at creating. 
   
  From their pens to your your ears.  
   
  01 - 3 Stories About - Life & Existence 
  02 - The Four Fists by F Scott Fitzgerald 
  03 - Mold of the Earth by Boleslaw Prus 
  04 - The Luck of Roaring Camp by Bret Harte

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  Dead-End Memories - Stories

  Banana Yoshimoto

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  Japan's internationally celebrated master storyteller returns with five stories of women on their way to healing that vividly portrays the blissful moments and the sorrows that surround us in everyday life 
   
   
   
  First published in Japan in 2003, Dead-End Memories collects the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, quietly discover their ways back to recovery. 
   
   
    
  Among the women we meet in Dead-End Memories is one betrayed by her fiancé who finds a perfect refuge in an apartment above her uncle's bar while seeking the real meaning of happiness. In "House of Ghosts," the daughter of a yoshoku restaurant owner encounters the ghosts of a sweet elderly couple who haven't yet realized that they've been dead for years. In "Tomo-chan's Happiness," an office worker who is a victim of sexual assault finally catches sight of the hope of romance. 
   
   
    
  Yoshimoto's gentle, effortless prose reminds us that one true miracle can be as simple as having someone to share a meal with, and that happiness is always within us if only we take a moment to pause and reflect. Discover this collection of what Yoshimoto herself calls the "most precious work of my writing career."

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  The Red Flower - This deep...

  Vsevelod Garshin

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  Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was born on 14th February 1855 in what is now Dnipro in the Ukraine, but then part of the Russian Empire. 
   
  After attending secondary school he studied at the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute.  
   
  Wars between and on behalf of Empires were a regular feature of the decades then.  Garshin volunteered to serve in the Russian army at the beginning of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877.  
   
  He began as a private in the Balkans campaign and was wounded in action.  By the end of the war, in 1878, he had been promoted to officer rank.  
   
  By now Garshin, having previously published some articles and reviews in newspapers, wished to devote himself to a literary career.  The decision made he resigned his army commission. 
   
  His time as a soldier provided rich experiences for his early stories. His first ‘Four Days’ was related as the interior monologue of a wounded soldier left for dead on the battlefield for four days, face to face with the corpse of a Turkish soldier he had killed, gained him early admiration as an author of note.  
   
  He wrote perhaps only 20 stories, but their influence was immense, although in these more modern times he is barely remembered and lives in the more prolific shadows of others.  His characters are superbly worked into stories that come alive in the intensity and reality of his prose.   
   
  Garshin’s most well-known story is ‘The Red Flower’, also known as ‘Scarlet Blossom’ and is easily amongst the first rank of stories dealing with mental health issues. 
    
  Despite early literary success, he himself experienced periodical bouts of mental illness.   
   
  In one such bout Garshin attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself down the stone stairs leading into his apartment building.  Although not immediately fatal, Vsevolod Garshin died as a result of his injuries in a St Petersburg hospital on 5th April 1888.  He was 33. 
   
  In this captivating story a man is placed into an insane asylum.  Life may be grim within its walls but he has a plan to remove evil from the world.  All it takes is further sacrifice from himself.

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  Tales From the Liminal

  S. K. Kruse

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  In this collection of curious and delightful short stories, you never know who you’re going to meet or where you’re going to end up. You can be certain, however, that you’ll always find yourself smack dab in the middle of some befuddling predicament of existence.  
  Using humor and horror, satire and allegory, fabulism and realism, Tales From the Liminal takes you for an extraordinary ride, submerging you in spaces where anything is possible, especially transformation.

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  The Happy Tradies - Bushfire

  Faith Charity

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  ‘The Happy Tradies’ is a collection of short animated stories about tradies and what they do in their daily work to solve problems. 
  Their main drive is to get things done for other people who need their skills and in return the tradie have an enriched life. 
  There is always a mystery or crisis for the tradies to solve and they can do it because they have the skills and knowledge and the tools. 

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  A Dead Secret - From their pens...

  Lafcadio Hearn

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  Lafcadio Hearn was born on the 27th June 1850 on the Ionian isle of Levkás in Greece to a British Army officer and a Greek Mother. 
  His father, fearing for his career prospects at being married to a Greek Orthodox wife, sent them to Dublin whilst he continued to advance his career with further postings.  Life there was difficult for mother and son.  His father returned, wounded and traumatised, when Lafcadio was three.  He annulled the marriage and she remarried but had to give up care of Lafcadio to her sister-in law.   
  After brief periods for Catholic education in England and France he emigrated to Ohio in the United States when he was 19, taking on a series of casual jobs before embarking on a career as a journalist, publishing poems and essays in Cincinnati.  It was whilst here that he began a side-line in translating, starting with Gautier and Flaubert.  He married in 1874 to a 20 year old African-American woman in violation of Ohio's anti-miscegenation law.  The marriage soon failed. 
  In 1877 he relocated to New Orleans to write on a variety of themes before picking up a two year assignment from Harper’s to write in the West Indies, where he also wrote his first novel. 
  In 1890 Harper’s sent him to Japan.  Here he left journalism and took the remarkable decision to become a schoolteacher in the north of Japan.   Enraptured by the culture he was driven to explain it in various Western publications to those who had little, if any, knowledge of its culture.  Within the year he had fallen in love with, and married, a high-born Japanese lady, together they would have four children.   
  In 1895 he became a Japanese national and took the name Koizumi Yakumo, Koizumi being his wife’s family name. 
  The following few years, whilst a professor of Literature at the Imperial University of Japan, were his most creative and admired period.   
  Lafcadio Hearn died of heart failure on the 26th of September 1904, in Tokyo, Japan shortly before leaving to deliver a series of lectures at Cornell University in New York State.  He was 54.

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