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  Old Fashioned Landowners -...

  Nikolai Gogol

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  Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born on 1st April 1809 to a father, descended from Ukrainian Cossacks and a mother with a military background in the Ukrainian town of Sorochyntsi, then part of the Russian Empire and rich in Cossack traditions and folklore.   
   
  His father wrote poetry and plays which the young Gogol helped stage at his uncle’s home theatre.  This helped ignite in him a love of literature and blossomed when he attended, what is now, the Nizhyn Gogol State University at the age of 12.  Here he participated in school theatre productions and refined his mastery of his native Ukrainian and also the Russian of his Imperial masters. 
   
  In 1828 he went to St Petersburg and unsuccessfully tried to begin a career as an actor after finding that with no money and no connections the civil service was barred to him. 
   
  Embezzling money from his mother he embarked on a trip to Germany. When the money ran out, he returned to St Petersburg but the experiences were used in a series of stories he contributed to periodicals.  These tales were steeped in his childhood memories of the Ukrainian landscape and peasantry enlivened with the supernatural of its folklore woven with realistic events of the day.  He wrote in Russian in a whimsical, colloquial style with a smattering of Ukrainian words and phrases that provided an authenticity.  Eight stories were published as ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’.  Seemingly all at once fame and fortune arrived. Gogol was hailed by his contemporaries, including Pushkin, as a pre-eminent writer of Russian literature.   
   
  His success continued with his brilliant plays ‘The Inspector General’ and the comedy ‘The Marriage for the Theatre’, both being highly acclaimed.   
   
  In 1834 he became Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg but with little academic or teacher training, failed to adequately fulfil many of his duties and soon resigned this post.  With no obligations and using his earnings from his writing, which now included the impressionistic and immortal ‘Dead Souls’, Gogol travelled around Europe, spending the most time in Rome where he studied art, read Italian literature and developed a passion for opera.  
   
  In the 1840s Gogol became preoccupied with a need to purify his soul and embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In tandem he fell under the influence of a strict and austere spiritual ascetic who persuaded him to observe strict fasts that, allied with his depression and deteriorating health, contributed to his death on 21st April 1852 at the age of only 43. 
   
  In ‘Old Fashioned Land Owners’ Gogol describes a peaceful setting and a peaceful couple who have grown old together.  But foreboding makes an entrance and life is now a series of cruel twists that breaks everything.

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  Edgar Allan Poe - Four Tales Of...

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  Edgar Allan Poe. We’re pleased to bring you here four tales of terror from the master himself – Edgar Allan Poe. Beautifully written theirs plots, characters and descriptions sometimes suffocate such is the atmosphere they build up. Of course Poe is expert at having you, the audience, involved ratcheting up the tension till the final unmentionable moments.

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  The Grass Harp

  Truman Capote

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  Set on the outskirts of a small Southern town, The Grass Harp tells the story of three endearing misfits—an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies—who one day take up residence in a tree house. As they pass sweet yet hazardous hours in a china tree, The Grass Harp manages to convey all the pleasures and responsibilities of freedom. But most of all it teaches us about the sacredness of love, "that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life." 
  This volume also includes Capote's A Tree of Night and Other Stories, which the Washington Post called "unobtrusively beautiful . . . a superlative book."

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  Jared Pond and the Temper...

  Martin Lundqvist

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  In this episode, Jared Pond is the bodyguard to an Australian badboy tennis player, Alexander Snapovic. As Alex is arrested for fighting the cops, Jared has to win enough money to get him out of jail. However, is Jared being played by his noseless ex-girlfriend Mariana Castro?

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  Ten Random and Very Short Stories

  Martin Lundqvist

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  This anthology contains ten random short stories. Some are funny, some are chilling and most of them are plain weird: 
  Contains the Following stories. 
  100 Tinder Dates. 
  A Fairy-Tale Wedding. 
  A High-Level Tennis Match! 
  Curiosity Saved the Cat. 
  Money Laundering in the Laundromat. 
  Murder on the Ghan. 
  The First Human Clone. 
  The Mayor of Mayonnaise Manor. 
  The Quest to Find Pachamama's Veil. 
  Bonus Track 
  Christmas Mayhem

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  Aunts and Pianos

  E.F. Benson

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  Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist, and short story writer, best known for his masterly and uncanny ghost stories. Less well known are his wonderful humorous stories, of which "Aunts and Pianos" is one. Bobby is an accomplished and charming pianist who has befriended a number of rich elderly widows and spinsters, each of which he refers to as "aunt". He already has his own Bechstein grand piano, plus another concert grand which was (touchingly but highly inconveniently)  left to him by a late "aunt". Now various of his other "aunts" are also keen to offload their grand pianos on him...

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