Other books that might interest you

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  The Girls Are Pretty Crocodiles...

  Angela Readman

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  Bold, beautiful and spiky, Angela Readman's stories are both magical and real. Following her acclaimed debut Don't Try This at Home, in this new collection, she approaches the fairy tale with a scalpel. The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles reads like a love letter to girlhood and a ransom note to all the fairy tales we have been told. In her prize-winning work 'The Story Never Told', an illiterate woman sells fairy tales for a book she knows will never have her name on the cover. In 'What's Inside a Girl', a class takes lessons on dating invisible girls.
  Dark, funny and surreal, these stories explore, challenge and ultimately transform the traditional fairy tale narrative. Women learn to be origami, climb into swan skins, feed wolves, flip burgers and snog kelpies. In dazzling prose that remains matter-of-fact, these tales take to task the happy endings we have been sold.
  Otherworldly, yet down to earth, The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles discovers the hidden voice in the stories we know and reveals the magic of working-class lives. These stories have teeth.
  "Angela Readman's stories have a compelling intimacy and gorgeous imagery, and are often deeply moving – highly recommended reading." Alison Moore, author of Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse
  "Angela Readman's subtly dark stories rip the covers from the everyday. She turns its innocents and introverts inside-out before us, meanwhile exposing secret rituals and Chinese-whispery legends from all our suffocating and self-contained neighbourhoods. Throughout this new collection, the other Angela – Carter – hangs on Readman's shoulder as she creates an eerie new folklore for fraught times. These are the stories we always knew existed but were never brave enough to tell, even to ourselves." Ashley Stokes, author of Gigantic, Unsung Stories, 2021
  "A poetic recontextualising of fairy tales and folklore, The Girls Are Pretty Crocodiles manages to be both playful and dangerous, often in the same sentence. Readman deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Kirsty Logan and Marina Warner, as one of the natural successors to Angela Carter." Dan Coxon, author of Only The Broken Remain and editor of This Dreaming Isle

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  The Dead Smile

  F. Marion Crawford

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  Sir Hugh takes his secret to the grave with a vicious grin on his lips – a devious grin that is somehow contagious.  
  A master of the short horror story, F. Marion Crawford’s contributions to the genre of supernatural fiction are significant. His collection of short stories, Wandering Ghosts, includes tales of vampires, ghouls, the undead, and more. “The Dead Smile” was first published in this collection in 1911. 

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  Spanking Naughty Girls 4 - Nikki...

  Peter Michaels

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  My name is James Jackson and I enjoy spanking naughty girls of all ages. Ivy is my wonderful and very understanding wife who encourages me to spank whoever I want, as long as there's no intercourse. This is the fourth audiobook in my spanking autobiography. In the first, I was introduced to extramarital spanking by my wife and her friend Bridget, and in the second, I was lucky enough to spank Kate Anderson to help her change her attitude and awful behaviour. In the third, I spanked Evelyn and her naughty daughter Emma. In this audiobook, you will meet Nikki, a twenty-four-year-old who is looking for some parental guidance. My wife and I took on the roles of Aunty Ivy and Uncle James. I hope you enjoy this as much as we did. I would encourage you to listen to the first audiobooks in this series first, but you don’t have to if that's not your thing.

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  Cool Air - From their pens to...

  HP Lovecraft

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  Howard Phillips Lovecraft is among the greatest American masters of fantasy and the supernatural.  
  Born in 1890, a native of Providence, Rhode Island, his health was uncertain from childhood and he led a sheltered early life. His semi-invalidism enabled him to read omnivorously, and as a shy imaginative child he began to invent what would in his adult life become a whole macabre fantastic world of his own, peopled by creatures out of his own weird imagination.  
  As an adult he was retiring, almost a recluse. Tall, thin and pale, but with bright alert eyes, he was much given to wandering his native city in the dark hours of the night, and he became a devoted student of its antiquities.  
  Although he began to write early he had nothing published until he was in his twenties. He set many of his stories around the imaginary town of Arkham, and invented an entire mythology of his own, its core being the demoniac cult of Cthulhu, based on the lore or legend that the world was at one time inhabited by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold or were expelled, yet live on outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again. 
  Since his early death in 1937 his stories have continued to attract attention and praise from an ever-growing audience.

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  The Best Years of Your Life - A...

  Halle Hill

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  A young woman who works admissions at a scam for-profit college is navigating the lies she sells for a living when she befriends an elderly applicant. The Best Years of Your Life is a short story from Halle Hill’s Good Women, which delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South. Darkly funny and deeply human, Good Women observes how place, blood ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries―or lack thereof―influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don’t expect.

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  The Altar of the Dead - A...

  Henry James

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  Henry James was born 15th April 1843 in New York City. 
   
  His youth was spent travelling with his family receiving what was an "extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous" education as they journeyed through London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Newport, Rhode Island, according to the father's current interests and publishing ventures. James studied primarily with tutors and only briefly attended schools.    
   
  Undoubtedly the quality of his writing has ensured his name is enshrined in the American literary tradition.  
   
  James was a committed Anglophile and spent most of his adult life as an expatriate in Europe.  Many of his novels juxtapose the Old World with the New World. Classics such as ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, ‘Daisy Miller’ and ‘The Ambassadors’, display the entanglement between American and European cultures and mentalities. They highlight the differences between the two worlds through following the experiences of American expatriates in Europe.  
   
  A prolific author he was able to easily move across genres to create vivid and totally real worlds and situations and to offer sophisticated observations of human relations as well as realistic, social criticism. 
  As a critic James was unafraid to venture into reviews and essays of those other literary giants around him.  These together with his short stories and, of course, classic novels, make Henry James an author to be not only admired but read, and read often.  
   
  In 1915 Henry James became a British citizen. 
   
  On 28th February 1916, at the age of 72, Henry James died in Chelsea, London. 
   
  He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912 and 1916. He never won. 
   
  In this story James examines the effect that the death of a dearly loved person has on a man’s life.  How he copes, how he grieves and how he attempts to move forward.

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