Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing
From the first time that John Lansing and Mary Hollister laid eyes on one another, they shared a special connection that seemed to transcend space and time. After their marriage, Lansing suddenly finds himself the subject of an intense manhunt and flees town. Will their strange link be able to survive his exile?
Take a step. Take a bow. Look around, how far you've come. For an immortal, the mortal world has little to offer them. Except, perhaps, perspective. Descent from the Mountain is a short story set in the A Thousand Li universe. This story can be read as a stand-alone. There are no spoilers for later works and the short story does not include individuals from the main series.Show book
The bookshelves of British literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors. From these Isles their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure. Among them is Walter Besant.Show book
First published in April, 1910, "The Horse of the Invisible" tells the tale of Carnacki, a ghost detective investigating the haunting of a country house that threatens the wedding of the Hisgins Family's daughter and her fiance. The source of the apparition must be found before the soon-to-be-wed woman is driven mad, or even to her death. Carnacki does not suspect supernatural forces are at work in this case, but even a ghostbuster can be wrong.Show book
For Sarah's family, memories of early Sixties Aba in south-eastern Nigeria are scorched onto their hearts. A days-old burial mound exposed as an 'exploded diagram' of bones picked clean by beasts. Adaku the Barbary duck with a 'melted face', who was conscripted into friendship by six-year-old Sarah in the first of a lifetime's unlikely alliances, forged by necessity and relocation. The narcotic puff let out from the freezer in the meat-man's shack off the Ikot Ekpene road, where Maureen, Sarah's lonely mother, gave up aspirations to be a 'proper oil company wife' to Jim, and risked buying 'bush meat'. The dry 'snakeskin' bark of the old iroko tree on the bend of the town's river, under whose shade Jim sought sanctuary from people, and whose 'two long white catkins the tree one day bestowed onto his head like confetti.' Back home, Jim swaps adventure and agency for woodwork and more whisky. Maureen, denying her love of Igbo crafts and cloth, considers reinventing herself as an Oxfam shop assistant. In the days before her grandmother's funeral, Sarah finds the platitudes of her father evasive compared to the wisdom and ritual taught by servant Chidike while burying the household monkey. Sarah's hard-won Nigerian barter goods, a silver thumb-ring and a dare taken to eat fried-fat market 'snack', become devalued. At Aba's Sancta Maria, unaccustomed food was a cone of hot roast groundnuts paid for by a penny with a hole. In Britain, 'unaccustomed' means milk with a 'thickened band of yellow'. Now, the currency is a dare Sarah first honours, then refuses. As people of that time and place are scattered like those bleached bones, Aba acts as centripetal force on their imagination. Today's city was a small town the like of which Tim Winton gnaws at from different angles in The Turning. Mandy Sutter's approach is similarly innovative. Her themes are substitution, racism, and whether the spirit can ever survive transaction.Show book
Mary Frances Butts was born on 13th December 1890 in Poole, Dorset. Her early years were spent at Salterns, an 18th-century house overlooking Poole Harbour. Sadly in 1905 her father died, and she was sent for boarding at St Leonard's school for girls in St Andrews. Her mother remarried and, from 1909, Mary studied at Westfield College in London, and here, first became aware of her bisexual feelings. She was sent down for organising a trip to Epsom races and only completed her degree in 1914 when she graduated from the London School of Economics. By then Mary had become an admirer of the occultist Aleister Crowley and she was given a co-authorship credit on his ‘Magick (Book 4)’. In 1916, she began the diary which would now detail her future life and be a constant reference point for her observations and her absorbing experiences. During World War I, she was doing social work for the London County Council in Hackney Wick, and involved in a lesbian relationship. Life changed after meeting the modernist poet, John Rodker and they married in 1918. In 1921 she spent 3 months at Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Sicily; she found the practices dreadful and also acquired a drug habit. Mary now spent time writing in Dorset, including her celebrated book of short stories ‘Speed the Plough’ which saw fully develop her unique Modernist prose style. Europe now beckoned and several years were spent in Paris befriending many artists and writing further extraordinary stories. She was continually sought after by literary magazines and also published several short story collections as books. Although a Modernist writer she worked in other genres but is essentially only known for her short stories. Mary was deeply committed to nature conservation and wrote several pamphlets attacking the growing pollution of the countryside. In 1927, she divorced and the following year her novel ‘Armed with Madness’ was published. A further marriage followed in 1930 and time was spent attempting to settle in London and Newcastle before setting up home on the western tip of Cornwall. By 1934 the marriage had failed. Mary Butts died on 5th March 1937, at the West Cornwall Hospital, Penzance, after an operation for a perforated gastric ulcer. She was 46.Show book
"For almost six decades Segal has quietly produced some of the best fiction and essays in American literature . . ." —The New York Times Beloved New Yorker writer Lore Segal, at ninety-five years old, is a national treasure. Working at the height of her powers, in this story collection she turns her gimlet eye and compassionate humor on aging and life in the slow lane. From the master of the short short comes a collection of sixteen new stories featuring old friends who have loved and lunched together for over forty years. These erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians offer startling insights into friendship, family and aging. Can the group organize a visit to one of their number in her new, and detested, assisted living situation? Is this a fabulous party with old friends, or a funeral reception? And does who was sleeping with whom, way back when, still matter? In story after story, Segal's voice is always hilarious and urbane, heartbreaking and profound, keen and utterly unsentimental, as she tackles aging's affronts.Show book
