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  Lafcadio Hearn - A Short Story...

  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. 
   
  1 - Lafcadio Hearn - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  2 - A Dead Secret by Lafcadio Hearn 
  3 - Before the Supreme Court by Lafcadio Hearn 
  4 - Diplomacy by Lafcadio Hearn 
  5 - L'Amour Apres La Mort by Lafcadio Hearn 
  6 - Of A Promise Broken by Lafcadio Hearn 
  7 - Stranger Than Fiction by Lafcadio Hearn 
  8 - The Corpse Rider by Lafcadio Hearn 
  9 - The Ghostly Kiss by Lafcadio Hearn 
  10 - The Undying One by Lafcadio Hearn 
  11 - The Vision of the Dead Creole by Lafcadio Hearn

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  A Legend of Old Egypt - From...

  Boleslaw Prus

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  Aleksander Głowacki who wrote under the nom de plume Boleslaw Prus was born on 20th August 1847 at Hrubieszów in the Kingdom of Poland, at that time, controlled by the Russian Empire. 
  At three his mother died and then at nine his father.  Female relatives helped raise him but at 15 he joined the Polish uprising against the might of Imperial Russia.  Wounded on the battlefield, arrested and imprisoned, he was later released into the care of a relative and resumed secondary school and then Warsaw University but poverty forced him to leave after two years.  At some point he developed agoraphobia which often caused problems. 
  In 1869, he enrolled in the Forestry Department at Puławy but was soon sacked and so he began a system of self-education that led to work as a newspaper columnist on a wide-ranging series of topics that eventually became the ‘Weekly Chronicles’ and spanned 40 years. 
  With his finances now stabilized he married and then adopted his late brother-in-law’s son.  
  It seems he had doubts as to the scale of his talents and early on adopted the name ‘Boleslaw Prus’ for both his journalistic and literary offerings. 
  His work as a short-story writer met with much acclaim. He wrote several dozen of them, originally published in newspapers and ranging in length from micro-story to novella. His keen observation of everyday life and sense of humor are evident in them.  
  During his career he also wrote novels. After ‘Pharoah’, in 1895, he embarked on a four-month journey taking in Berlin, Dresden, Nuremberg, Rapperswil in Switzerland, where he stayed for two months, and his final destination, Paris.  Here his agoraphobia was so bad he couldn’t cross the Seine.  
  However, his writing continued and in 1911 his novel ‘Changes’, though uncompleted, began to be serialised.  It was never finished. 
  Boleslaw Prus died on 19th May 1912, at his Warsaw apartment.  He was 64.  A National Hero, thousands attended both his funeral service and interment.

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  The Billionaire's Second Chance...

  Bree Livingston

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  He’s never gotten over her. She’s never stopped loving him. 
  Five years ago, best friends Link Novak and Hadley Shaw called it quits on their relationship when her career became the third wheel. Since then, Link became a billionaire and Hadley’s career hasn’t been nearly as satisfying as she’d envisioned. 
  Now, they’re reuniting for a friend’s wedding and sparks are flying once again. Will old wounds push them apart once and for all, or will a little Luck Lake magic give them the second chance they’ve been hoping for? 
  Take one hour, add a short story, and you’ve got the makings of a fun escape that ends in a satisfying happily ever after. Grab this short read now!

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  Moonshine springs

  Mikhail Bulgakov

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  Moonshine springs - is a satirical story by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (1891 - 1940), an outstanding writer, playwright and theatre worker.
  Bulgakov was a Soviet playwright, novelist, and short story writer best known for his humor and penetrating satire. Because of their realism and humor, Bulgakov's works enjoyed great popularity, but their trenchant criticism of Soviet mores was increasingly unacceptable to the authorities.

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  Horror at Sea: Volume 2 - More...

  William Hope Hodgson, M. J....

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  "Horror at Sea" returns! More nautical nightmares: from a ship’s terrifying encounter with something monstrous in Demons of the Sea; to a tale of murder with a touch of maritime superstition in The Jonah. 
  "There’ll be restless nights for thee, upon these seven seas..." 
  Contents: 
  Demons of the Sea by William Hope Hodgson 
  A ship's encounter with something monstrous. 
  The Boat on the Beach by Kadra Maysi 
  Strange was the woman who came down to the boat at night. 
  Table for Two by Arthur Leo Zagat 
  It was just the sea you heard. 
  The Voice in the Dawn by William Hope Hodgson 
  A strange voice greets the crew at dawn. 
  The Horror in the Hold by Frank Belknap Long 
  A tale of the old 'adventurous' days. 
  The Seven Seas Are One by Allison V. Harding 
  The Captain's fate was coming. 
  Drowned Argosies by Jay Wilmer Benjamin 
  The Volcania had gone down. 
  Sea Curse by Robert E. Howard 
  The baneful force of an old woman’s curse. 
  The Horror at Martin's Beach by H. P. Lovecraft 
  A horrifying creature killed by sailors at sea. 
  The Harbor of Ghosts by M. J. Bardine 
  The ghosts of ships that had foundered. 
  When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead by Robert Peery 
  The mariners came up out of the sea. 
  The Jonah by Guy Pain 
  A murder, with a touch of maritime superstition. 
  A Tropical Horror by William Hope Hodgson 
  A ship attacked by a monstrous sea creature. 
  Bells of Oceana by Arthur J. Burks 
  Something deadly in the uncharted waters. 
  Death of the Kraken by David H. Keller 
  In the Sargasso Sea are many monsters.

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  Dionea - Violet Paget wrote...

  Vernon Lee

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  Vernon Lee was born Violet Paget on 4th October 1856 in Boulogne, France to intellectual expatriate British parents.   
   
  In common with several other very talented literary women of the day she felt it necessary to publish under a masculine pseudonym in order for her writing to be taken seriously.  Indeed she seems to have adopted that persona across her whole lifestyle becoming personally known and acknowledged by all as Vernon Lee and accordingly dressed as a man.    
   
  Her first published work, in 1880, was taken from her collection of essays that had originally appeared in Fraser’s Magazine with the scholarly title of; ‘Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy.’ It reflected her passion for music and centered on the rich creative lives of poet-librettist Pietro Metastasio and dramatists Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi.   
   
  She wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music, and travel with her scholarly appreciation animated by wit and imagination.  Lee was well-regarded as an expert on the Italian Renaissance and was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement. 
   
  Her literary talents were extensive and she wrote a number of novels and plays.  Perhaps her best remembered works are her haunting and powerful short stories exploring the supernatural.  Lee has often received accolades for these and glowingly compared to other authors such as M R James. 
    
  A committed pacifist she was resolved to protest against World War I. Her social activism in other areas was perhaps fueled by her feminist beliefs.  In her private life she was a lesbian and had long-term passionate relationships with three women including the doomed author and poet, Amy Levy.   
   
  Vernon Lee died on 13th February 1935 in San Gervasio Bresciano, Italy.  
   
  In Dionea we discover that a young girl has been washed ashore near Genoa.  Her life could be one of misery or success depending on the fates.  But despite her ravishing beauty Dionea grows up to be not the woman all had hoped she might become.

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