Other books that might interest you

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  Christmas Fiction off the Beaten...

  Laurie Lucking, Michelle L....

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  Not your Granny's Christmas stories … 
   Step off the beaten path and enjoy six stories that look beyond the expected, the traditional, the tried-and-true. 
   Inspired by the song, Mary Did You Know? -- a mother's memories of events leading up to and following that one holy night. MARY, DID YOU KNOW? 
   A young woman seeking her own identity searches for the man who tried to kill her and her mother on Christmas Eve twenty years before. A ROSE FROM THE ASHES 
   Princess, tower, sorceress, dragon, brave knight, clever peasant -- combine these ingredients into a Christmas-time story that isn't quite what you'd expect. RETURN TO CALLIDORA 
   Anticipating tough financial times, the decision not to buy or exchange presents leads to some painful and surprising revelations for a hardworking man and his family. NOT THIS YEAR 
   Years ago, a gunman and a store full of hostages learned some important lessons about faith and pain and what really matters in life -- and the echoes from that day continue to the present. THOSE WHO STAYED 
   A community of refugees, a brutal winter, a doorway to another world -- a touch of magic creating holiday joy for others leads to a Christmas wish fulfilled. CRYSTAL CHRISTMAS 
   

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  Night Zoo

  Sarah Barr

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  Longing for excitement in a heatwave, Liza inadvertently stumbles across the complexity of being a child in a grown-up world. Brendan is haunted by the ghosts of the past in the present, and Franny contemplates the meaning of home in a world made uncertain by global warming.
  
  With its dark twists and intense themes, Night Zoo subverts the reader's expectations at every turn. Throughout, Sarah Barr weaves an intricate, cyclical thread of regret and hope, offering captivating glimpses into the lives of her distinctive cast of characters. A compelling collection, it forms a powerful portrait of life, painting the extraordinary in the everyday.
  
  An expert blend of feminism and motherhood – set against a backdrop of climate change and with a breadth of settings explored – these stunning stories celebrate the variety and vitality that encompass the human experience.

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  Honeymoons in Temporary Locations

  Ashley Shelby

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  Climate disaster–induced fugue states, mutinous polar bears, support groups for recently displaced millionaires, men who hear trees, and women who lose their wives on environmental refugee resettlement trips. In these dispatches from a weirding world, the absurd and fantastic are increasingly indistinguishable from reality. Exploring this liminal moment, Ashley Shelby's collection of climate fictions imagines a near future that is both unnervingly familiar and subversively strange. 
   
   
   
  Set in the same post-climate-impact era, these stories range from playfully satirical to poignantly humane, bending traditional narrative forms and coming together into a brilliant and unusual contemplation of our changing world. Featuring the Hugo-nominated novelette "Muri," Honeymoons in Temporary Locations processes the unthinkable through riotous inventions like guided tours of submerged cities, Craigslist ads placed by climate refugees, and cynical pharmaceutical efforts to market a drug to treat solastalgia, the existential distress caused by environmental change. 
   
   
   
  Shelby reengineers the dystopic bleakness that characterizes so much climate fiction by embracing an eclectic experimentalism leavened with humor, irony, and the inevitable bathos that characterizes the human experience. Unexpected and clever, this innovative collection confirms her status as a visionary writer whose work expands the forms, attitudes, and possibilities of climate fiction.

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  Vincente Blasco Ibanez - A Short...

  Vincente Blasco Ibanez

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  Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was born in Valencia, Spain on 29th January 1867.  
   
  At university, he studied law and graduated in 1888 but never felt the urgency to practice - he was more interested in politics, journalism, literature and women.   
   
  Politically he was a militant Republican partisan and, in his youth, founded a newspaper, El Pueblo (The People). The newspaper was taken to court many times and he made many enemies. In one incident he was shot and almost killed. In 1896, Ibáñez was arrested and sentenced to a few months in prison. 
   
  Despite this colourful background he found time to write novels. His first published work was ‘La Araña Negra’ (The Black Spider) in 1892, a work that he later repudiated although at the time it was a useful vehicle for him to express his anti-clerical views. 
   
  In 1894, he published ‘Arroz y Tartana’ (Airs and Graces), about a late 19th Century widow in Valencia trying to keep up appearances in order to marry her daughters well.   
   
  Ibáñez’s next sequence of books studied rural life in the farmlands of Valencia and failed to gain much of an audience.   
   
  His writing now took on a new direction with its now familiar sensational and melodramatic themes in 1908 with ‘Sangre y Arena’ (Blood and Sand), which follows the career of Juan Gallardo from his poor beginnings as a child in Seville, to his rise to becoming a famous matador in Madrid 
   
  However, his greatest success was ‘Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) in 1916, which tells a tangled tale of the French and German sons-in-law of an Argentinian land-owner who find themselves fighting on opposite sides in the First World War.  It was a literary and commercial sensation and became the best-selling book of 1919.  It also propelled Rudolph Valentino to stardom in the 1921 film. 
   
  Ironically his fame in the English-speaking world has come not as a novelist but as the stories behind some of Hollywood’s greatest silent movies. 
   
  Vicente Blasco Ibáñez died in Menton, France on January 28th, 1928, the day before his 61st birthday. 
   
  01 - Vicente Blasco Ibanez - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  02 - Compassion by Vicente Blasco Ibanez 
  03 - Luxury by Vicente Blasco Ibanez 
  04 - Rabies by Vicente Blasco Ibanez 
  05 - The Last Lion by Vicente Blasco Ibanez 
  06 - The Windfall by Vicente Blasco Ibanez<

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  Punchkin

  Mary Frere

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  Mary Eliza Isabella Frere (1845–1911) was an English author of works regarding India. She is most famous for her beautiful retellings of Indian fairy tales.  
  "Punchkin" is a traditional fairy tale about a Rajah with seven daughters. When he remarries, the princesses' stepmother is determined to do away with the girls and make her own daughter the heir to the throne. A series of adventures and trials follows which leads to the overthrow of an evil magician.

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  Just Pervs

  Jess Taylor

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  Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, Bisexual Fiction Category.
  Two sex addicts meet and fall in love. A woman catches her husband cheating on her with their dog and escapes to her sister's horse farm. Four friends—fellow pervs—grow up and drift apart, pining for each other in silence until one of them is murdered.
  In Jess Taylor's sophomore story collection, contemporary views of female sexuality are subverted, and women are given agency over their desires and bodies. Through these characters, sex is revealed to be many things at once: gross, shameful, exhilarating, hidden or open—and always complicated. Reminiscent of the works of Maggie Nelson, Mary Gaitskill and Chris Kraus, the stories in Just Pervs explore the strange oppression and illumination created by desire, the bewilderment of adolescence, and the barriers to intimacy both discovered within and imposed upon ourselves.

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