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  British Short Story The - Volume...

  Ada Ester Leverson, William...

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  These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves.  Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language. 
   
  Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind.  These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology’s boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles - which as a geographical definition is the UK mainland and the island of Ireland - and wrote in a familiar form of English. 
   
  Whilst Daniel Defoe is the normal starting point we begin a little earlier with Aphra Behn, an equally colourful character as well as an astonishing playwright and poet.  And this is how we begin to differentiate our offering; both in scope, in breadth and in depth.  These islands have raised and nurtured female authors of the highest order and rank and more often than not they have been sidelined or ignored in favour of that other gender which usually gets the plaudits and the royalties. 
   
  Way back when it was almost immoral that a woman should write.  A few pages of verse might be tolerated but anything else brought ridicule and shame.  That seems unfathomable now but centuries ago women really were chattel, with marriage being, as the Victorian author Charlotte Smith boldly stated ‘legal prostitution’.  Some of course did find a way through - Jane Austen, the Brontes and Virginia Woolf but for many others only by changing their names to that of men was it possible to get their book to publication and into a readers hands.  Here we include George Eliot and other examples. 
   
  We add further depth with many stories by authors who were famed and fawned over in their day.  Some wrote only a hidden gem or two before succumbing to poverty and death. There was no second career as a game show guest, reality TV contestant or youtuber. They remain almost forgotten outposts of talent who never prospered despite devoted hours of pen and brain. 
   
  Keeping to a chronological order helps us to highlight how authors through the ages played around with characters and narrative to achieve distinctive results across many scenarios, many styles and many genres. The short story became a sort of literary laboratory, an early disruptor, of how to present and how to appeal to a growing audience as a reflection of social and societal changes.  Was this bound to happen or did a growing population that could read begin to influence rather than just accept? 
   
  Moving through the centuries we gather a groundswell of authors as we hit the Victorian Age - an age of physical mass communication albeit only on an actual printed page.  An audience was offered a multitude of forms: novels (both whole and in serialised form) essays, short stories, poems all in weekly, monthly and quarterly form.  Many of these periodicals were founded or edited by literary behemoths from Dickens and Thackeray through to Jerome K Jerome and, even some female editors including Ethel Colburn Mayne, Alice Meynell and Ella D’Arcy. 
   
  Now authors began to offer a wider, more diverse choice from social activism and justice – and injustice to cutting stories of manners and principles.  From many forms of comedy to mental meltdowns, from science fiction to unrequited heartache.  If you can imagine it an author probably wrote it.  
   
  At the end of the 19th Century bestseller lists and then prizes, such as the Nobel and Pulitzer, helped focus an audience’s attention to a books literary merit and sales worth. Previously coffeehouses, Imperial trade, unscrupulous overseas printers ignoring copyright restrictions, publishers with their book lists as an appendix and the gossip and interchange of polite society had been the main avenues to secure sales and profits.

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  Coastal Breeze

  Ed Robinson

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  Breeze is made an offer he can't refuse. A three million dollar yacht is his for the taking, but there are strings attached. He’s sent to Panama to repossess the vessel from its current captain, who becomes an unlikely ally during a mission to Colombia. 
   
   
   
  He desperately wants to get home to Florida, but the return trip is fraught with problems and complicated by the uneasy relationship with his passenger. Any attempt to come to terms with the loss of his lover must wait for the completion of the journey. 
   
   
   
  A new life awaits if he can stay alive long enough to realize it.

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  The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

  Max Shulman

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  Including stories first published in Cosmopolitan and theSaturday Evening Post, this bestselling collection follows the romantic escapades of Max Shulman's famed collegiate Don Juan. Like most undergraduates, Dobie Gillis is a bit scattered-sometimes he's as quick as a whip, other times dull as a doorstop, and his major keeps changing from chemistry to law to journalism. But no matter what subject he should be studying, Dobie always has a girl on his mind.

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  The Hired Baby A Romance of the...

  Mary Mackay

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  Mary Mackay was born on the 1st May 1855 in London. 
   
  At the age of 11 she was sent to a Parisian convent to further her education and returned to Britain four years later in 1870. 
   
  She began her career as a musician, giving piano recitals under the pseudonym of ‘Marie Corelli’ which she now also used as she turned to life as a writer. She published her first novel in 1866. From that point until World War I her popularity and sales exceeded those of Arthur Conan Doyle, H G Wells, and Rudyard Kipling, although she also faced criticism from the literary elite for her melodramatic writing. She was also fairly prolific; in total she wrote some 30 novels and short story collections. 
   
  A recurring theme in Corelli's books is her attempt to reconcile Christianity with reincarnation, astral projection as well as other mystical ideas that she was drawn too. She was also closely associated with the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis; a Rosicrucian and mystical organisation.  
   
  Corelli spent her final years in Stratford-upon-Avon and fought hard to preserve its 17th-century buildings. She was also somewhat eccentric boating on the Avon in a gondola, complete with gondolier, whom she had brought over from Venice. 
   
  For over forty years, Corelli lived with her devoted companion, Bertha Vyver. 
   
  During World War I she was convicted of food hoarding which shocked her paying public.  From that point she wrote little and sold little. 
   
  Marie Corelli died in Stratford on the 21st April 1924.  Later her beloved Bertha was buried alongside her.

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  Can't and Won't - Stories

  Lydia Davis

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  A new collection of short stories from the woman Rick Moody has called "the best prose stylist in America" 
   
   
   
  Her stories may be literal one-liners: the entirety of "Bloomington" reads, "Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before." Or they may be lengthier investigations of the havoc wreaked by the most mundane disruptions to routine: in "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates," a professor receives a gift of thirty-two small chocolates and is paralyzed by the multitude of options she imagines for their consumption. The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert's correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author's own dreams, or the dreams of friends. 
   
   
   
  What does not vary throughout Can't and Won't, Lydia Davis's fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.

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  The Summer He Didn't Die

  Jim Harrison

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  Three classic novellas from “one of our master chroniclers of human hungers, flaws, and frustrations.” (The Kansas City Star).   Jim Harrison’s vivid, tender, and deeply felt fictions have won him acclaim as an American master of the novella. His highly acclaimed volume of novellas, The Summer He Didn’t Die, is a sparkling and exuberant collection about love, the senses, and family, no matter how untraditional. In the title novella, Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan Indian, is trying to parent his two stepchildren and take care of his family’s health on meager resources. (It helps a bit that his charms are irresistible to the new dentist in town.) Republican Wives is a wicked satire on the sexual neuroses of the right, the emptiness of a life lived for the status quo, and the irrational power of love that, when thwarted, can turn so easily into an urge to murder. And Tracking is a meditation on Harrison’s fascination with place, telling his own familiar mythology through the places his life has seen and the intellectual loves he has known.   With wit as sharp and prose as lush as any Harrison has yet written, The Summer He Didn’t Die is a resonant, warm, and joyful ode to our journey on this earth.   “Harrison has proved to be one of our finest storytellers. These novellas are urgent and contemporary, displaying his marvelous gifts for compression and idiosyncratic language.” —Los Angeles Times

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