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  Sporting Guide - Los Angeles 1897

  Liz Goldwyn

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  A brilliantly imaginative recreation of an 1890s Los Angeles pocket guide, or "Sporting Guide," to the brothels of the day. 
   
  Before there was the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Los Angeles was a rough place, building its way out to the global city of today. In the late nineteenth century it was a rapidly growing city filled with pimps and prostitutes, Chinese railwaymen, robbers, smugglers, and corrupt politicians. It was a city where losers and dreamers from all over the world could came to make their fortune. 
   
  This era of her native city has always fascinated author, fashion icon, and filmmaker Liz Goldwyn. In a series of beautiful, haunting interlinked stories she recreates the Los Angeles of the 1890s through stories of its pimps, politicians, prostitutes—male and female—businessmen, madams, and johns. She takes listeners inside the bordellos and velvet curtained rooms where sex entices but power and money rule. Based on her original research in the libraries and archives of LA, these fictional stories center around real historical characters—like the famous owner of LA’s grandest brothel, Pearl Morton (whose tombstone Goldwyn discovered). Interspersed in those stories, Goldwyn writes about the historical realities of the time, from fashion to opium drug addiction to sexual practices and birth control. 
   
  Sporting Guide evokes a lost world of those on the margins of LA, of the hustlers who made it into one of the great cities of the world, and she gives a poignant voice to people and stories lost to time.

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  Poison

  Katherine Mansfield

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  Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.  
  'Poison' is the uneasy story of two starstruck lovers living together for the first time. But what was the truth about the woman's previous husbands?

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  Sudden Traveler - Stories

  Sarah Hall

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  “Sarah Hall is one of those rare writers whose short fiction has the same luminosity as her novels. But the short form allows her more room to probe and roam, to experiment with form, to sink her fingers into the earth.”—The Observer (London) 
  Featuring her signature themes of identity, eroticism, and existential quest, the stories in Sarah Hall’s third collection travel far afield in location and ambition—from Turkish forest and coastline to the rain-drenched villages of Cumbria. 
  The characters in Sudden Traveler walk, drive, dream, and fly, trying to reconcile themselves with their journeys through life, death, and love. Science fiction meets folktale and philosophy meets mortality. 
  A woman with a new generation of pacemaker chooses to shut it down in the Lakeland, the site of her strongest memories. A man repatriated in the near east hears the name of an old love called and must unpack history’s dark suitcase. From the new world-waves of female anger and resistance, a mythical creature evolves. And in the woods on the border between warring countries, an old well facilitates a dictator’s downfall, before he gains power. 
  A master of short fiction, Sarah Hall opens channels in the human mind and spirit and takes us to the very edge of our possible selves.

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  Clotilde Graves - A Short Story...

  Clotilde Graves

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  Clotilde Augusta Inez Mary Graves was born on the 3rd June 1863 at Buttevant Castle, Co. Cork, to parents with military backgrounds. 
   
  At age nine, the family moved to Southsea in England for yet another military posting.  Her father’s postings gave her valuable experiences that would be put to good use in later years in some of her literary works. 
   
  She was educated at a Catholic convent in Lourdes before returning to London in 1884 to study art in Bloomsbury.  She worked part-time at the British Museum and the Royal Female School of Art and generated further income by drawing little pen-and-ink grotesques for the comic papers.  
   
  A few years later a chance meeting found her writing extra lyrics for a pantomime version of Puss in Boots.  She followed up with several financially successful plays, both in London and New York, and gained a measure of notoriety in one with the comparison of marriage and prostitution.   
   
  Despite her dramatic success she published her first novel in 1911 under the pseudonym of Richard Dehan which she continued to use for later works.  As well as novels and plays she published collections of short stories which glow with talent and invention. 
   
  She was an unusual figure in London society, wearing her hair short, taking on a masculine manner and cut of clothing, and smoking cigarettes in public when such traits were considered eccentric at best.  Add to this her admired collection of Chinese and Japanese trophies, her enthusiasm for fly-fishing and her riding of a tricycle and you have a perfect image of this fascinating writer. 
   
  Clotilde Graves died at the convent of Our Lady of Lourdes at Hatch End in Middlesex, on the 3rd December 1932.  She was 69. 
   
  1 - Clotilde Graves - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  2 - Under The Electrics by Clotilde Graves writing as Richard Dehan 
  3 - The Lost Room by Clotilde Graves writing as Richard Dehan 
  4 - A Spirit Elopement by Clotilde Graves 
  5 - In The Fourth Dimension by Clotilde Graves writing as Richard Dehan 
  6 - A Nocturne by Clotilde Graves writing as by Richard Dehan

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  Miracles

  Barry Pain

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  Barry Eric Odell Pain (1864-1928) was an English journalist, poet, and writer best known for his ghost and horror stories."Miracles" is the tale of two extraordinarily talented men, Best and Bliss, who develop a way of communicating nonverbally and use it for a career on the stage as mind readers. But when a bereaved mother asks them to try to contact her dead son, things take on a highly unexpcted twist.

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  Middle Men - Stories

  Jim Gavin

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  In Middle Men, Stegner Fellow and New Yorker contributor Jim Gavin delivers a hilarious and panoramic vision of California, portraying a group of men, from young dreamers to old vets, as they make valiant forays into middle-class respectability. In " Play the Man" a high-school basketball player aspires to a college scholarship, in " Elephant Doors" , a production assistant on a game show moonlights as a stand-up comedian, and in the collection' s last story, the immensely moving " Costello" , a middle-aged plumbing supplies salesman comes to terms with the death of his wife. The men in Gavin' s stories all find themselves stuck somewhere in the middle, caught half way between their dreams and the often crushing reality of their lives. A work of profound humanity that pairs moments of high comedy with searing truths about life' s missed opportunities, Middle Men brings to life a series of unforgettable characters learning what it means to love and work and be in the world as a man, and it offers our first look at a gifted writer who has just begun teaching us the tools of his trade.

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