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  Passed - From their pens to your...

  Charlotte Mew

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  Charlotte Mary Mew was born on 15th November, 1869 in London to professional parents – her father was responsible for the design of Hampstead Town Hall. 
  Charlotte, one of seven children; three of whom died in early childhood, was educated at Lucy Harrison's School for Girls and attended lectures at University College, London. 
  In 1898 her father died but failed to make provision for the family. Her mother, anxious about the family's social standing, did not want that known even though there was heavy ongoing expense for two other siblings who were in mental institutions. 
  However for Charlotte helping to support this overhead and her mother and sister, Anne, meant that her ambition to be a paid writer must now become a reality. Initially this meant prose - her poetry was to gestate until later in life. 
  During this time Charlotte and Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on insanity to their children. 
  As a writer Charlotte was a modernist, resisting the shackles of Victorian society's suffocating demands on behaviour especially for women. Despite her diminutive figure and dainty feet, she wore trousers, kept her hair short, smoked roll ups, was a Lesbian and tried to appear masculine. 
  Her difficult family life, although her close relationship with Anne was a constant source of comfort and companionship until her death in 1927, was coupled with rejection in her personal life but also provided inspiration for her wonderfully insightful and original poetry that you can read here. 
  Despite her fans including Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf and Siegfried Sassoon, Charlotte's works have been shamefully neglected.  
  Charlotte Mew died on 24th March in 1928 and was buried at Hampstead Cemetery.

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  The Virgin - Story from one of...

  Aleister Crowley

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  Edward Alexander Crowley was born on 12th October 1875 to wealthy parents in Royal Leamington Spa in Warwickshire. 
  He was educated at Malvern College, Tonbridge School, Eastbourne College and finally Trinity College, Cambridge where he focused on his passions of mountaineering and poetry and published several volumes. 
  Life for Crowley was to abandon his parents’ Christian faith and instead to inject himself into Western esotericism.  In 1898, he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and was trained in ceremonial magic before studying both Hindu and Buddhist practices in India. 
  On his Egyptian honeymoon in 1904 he claimed contact with an entity―Aiwass―who gave him the sacred Book of the Law which served as the basis for the Thelema religion where he identified as its prophet.  During the Great War, which he spent in the United States, he claimed to be working for British Intelligence but by the 1920s he had decamped to pursue a libertine lifestyle in Sicily, and in the ensuing scandals was evicted by the Italian Government. 
  He divided the following two decades between France, Germany, and England, and the continuing promotion of Thelema. 
  During his life he gained widespread notoriety for his drug use, his bisexuality, and his alarming views on society.  In short, polite society frowned on his ways, his thoughts and his influence but to many others his stance had much of value.  Even after death he was a darling for the 60’s counterculture but his influence has since waned.   
  His literary works were both prolific and covered many topics.  In the early part of his career he published many poetry books, even plays, before his darker and more forceful works came to dominate his output. 
  Aleister Crowley died on 1st December 1947 at Hastings in England. He was 72.

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  Her Lover - From their pens to...

  Maxim Gorky

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  Alexei Maximovich Peshkov was born on 28th March 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. 
  Better known as Maxim Gorky he was orphaned at 11 and ran away from home at 12.  At 19 he had already attempted suicide and thereafter travelled, by foot, across the Russian Empire for 5 years. 
  His first book ‘Essays & Stories’ in 1898 was a sensation and so began a long career as an author of short stories, novels and plays.  Gorky saw writing as a moral and political act that would help to change the unjust world around him.  He was an ardent early advocate of the emerging Marxist movement and publicly opposed the Tsarist regime leading several times to his arrest.  
  In 1904 he began his own theatre but the censor banned every play and Gorky was forced to abandon the project. 
  But Gorky was a financially successful author, editor, and playwright and gave monies to political parties as well as for civil rights and social reform.  The brutal shooting of workers, which set in motion the Revolution of 1905, pushed Gorky more decisively toward radical solutions.  
  In 1906 he went to the United States to raise funds for the Bolsheviks. Those experiences including a scandal over travelling with his lover and not his wife deepened his contempt for the ‘bourgeois soul.’ 
  Gorky now moved to Capri in Italy, both for health reasons and to escape the increasingly repressive times in Russia.  
  An amnesty for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty saw him return to Russia in 1914. His politics remained close to the Bolshevik cause.  But soon, after the 1918 revolution, his essays referred to Lenin as a tyrant for his senseless arrests and repression.  He was soon appealing to the outside world for food aid after the catastrophic crop failure. 
  In October 1921 Gorky returned to Italy, now in Fascist hands, and settled in Sorrento until 1932.  His health worsened with the onset of tuberculosis. 
  He wrote several successful books there but now decided to find an understanding with the communist regime. Stalin invited him home and his return was hailed as a major propaganda victory.  He was decorated with the Order of Lenin, and a province, a park, and various streets re-named in his honour. 
  But he had his faults too.  In 1933, Gorky co-edited a book on the White Sea-Baltic Canal and denied even a single prisoner died during its construction, but thousands had. As well, knowing that some Nazis were homosexual, a phrase was attributed to him that said ‘exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish’.  Although he was himself was quoting another he was decidedly homophobic. 
  With the increase of Stalinist repression in 1935 Gorky was placed under unannounced house arrest. 
  Maxim Gorky died on the 18th June 1936 from pneumonia.  He was 68. 
  Stalin and Molotov were among those who carried Gorky's urn of ashes at his funeral.

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  How We Disappear - Novella &...

  Tara Lynn Masih

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  In How We Disappear, award-winning author Tara Lynn Masih offers listeners transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone—runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. 
  From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium, Masih’s characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes. 
  Described as “masterful” and as “striking and resonant” (Publishers Weekly), Masih’s fiction, crossing boundaries between historical and contemporary, sparks with awareness that nothing and no one is ever gone for good—and that the wilderness is never quite behind us.

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  Kess

  Tijan

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  She's one of two females in Roussou's Crew system. 
   
   
   
  He was sent to protect her. She never knew. 
   
   
   
  Until now . . . 
   
   
   
  A short standalone based in the Crew/Roussou world.

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  The Day Time Stopped Moving

  Bradner Buckner

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  All Dave Miller wanted to do was commit suicide in peace. He tried, but the things that happened after he'd pulled the trigger were all wrong. Like everyone standing around like statues. No St. Peter, no pearly gate, no pitchforks or halos. He might just as well have saved the bullet... Classic fiction from Bradnor Buckner, pen name for Ed Earl Repp, American writer, screenwriter and novelist.

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