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  Wednesday's Child - Stories

  Yiyun Li

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  This program is read by the author and includes an audio-only bonus story, Call Me Ishmael's Mother.A new collection—about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life—by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living—exile, assimilation, loss, love—with her trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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  The Ocean - A Novel

  James Hanley

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  Five shipwrecked passengers fight panic, thirst, and the sea itself One minute, sailor Joseph Curtain is in his bunk. The next, he is submerged in the ocean. A German torpedo has struck the Aurora, and she is sinking fast. Curtain makes his way to a lifeboat and guides the survivors aboard. There are only six of them, and when the submarine’s machine gun rakes the side of their boat, the number dwindles to five. Alongside Curtain are three men of various character and an elderly chaplain who is too sick to speak. Hope is slim, but Curtain will do what he must to survive.   He organizes the party into watches, rationing their food and enforcing strict discipline. But as their time in the boat stretches on, Curtain realizes that this tiny craft and its flagging crew are hardly a match for the power of the ocean.

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  The Lost Inheritance

  H. G. Wells

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  Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific English writer of science fiction stories and novels and is frequently credited as being the father of science fiction.'The Lost Inheritance' is the story of a young man whose sole purpose in life is to persuade his wealthy and eccentric uncle to leave him his fortune. He is delighted when the old man declares that he has written a will leaving him everything...but when the old man passes away, the will is nowhere to be found. What follows next is comic tragedy.

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  Defeat of Youth and Other Poems

  Aldous Huxley

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  Though later known for his essays and novels, Aldous Huxley started his writing career as a poet. Published in 1918, The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is his third compilation of poetry. The volume begins with "The Defeat of Youth", a sequence of twenty-two sonnets that explores irreconcilability of the ideal and the disappointing reality. Jerome Meckier called it “the century’s most successful sonnet sequence, better than Auden’s or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s.” In the rest of the volume, Huxley continues to explore themes started in The Burning Wheel, his first volume of poetry, including vision, blindness, and other contrasts. The volume concludes with two English translations by Huxley of two French poems: Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem “L’Après-midi d’un faune" and Arthur Rimbaud’s (1871) poem “Les Chercheuses de poux,” translated as “The Louse Hunters.”  Summary by Mary Kay.

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  O Henry - A Short Story...

  O Henry

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  William Sydney Porter was born on 11th September 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. At age 3 his mother died from tuberculosis. From an early age it was clear Porter had a large appetite for reading as he absorbed the world around him. 
   
  He first attended at a school run by his aunt before enrolling at the Lindsey Street High School and then worked at his uncle’s drugstore and gained a pharmacists’ license in 1881.  
   
  A persistent cough took him to Texas in the hope that a change of climate would help his symptoms. He took on various types of work, initially from ranch hand and cook and then as varied as pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began to write, though for now, purely as a hobby. 
   
  He was a member of several singing and dramatic groups when he met 17 year old Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy Austin family. Despite her mother’s objection owing to Athol’s tuberculosis, they began courting and in July 1887, they eloped and soon married. 
   
  Athol, impressed by his writing, encouraged him to get them published. A job as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office paid a healthy $100 dollars per month and life was good. 
   
  But then life turned cruel. His son died a few hours after birth although a daughter, Margaret, came the following year.  His job had to be vacated but another was found at the First National Bank of Austin. The bank operated informally and Porter was careless in keeping the books. He lost that job but began writing for the humourous weekly The Rolling Stone and the Houston Post. Some time later the federal Bank auditors went through his former accounts and he was arrested on charges of embezzlement. 
   
  Porter fled the day before his trial to Honduras. Holed up for several months he began to write.  Athol had become too ill to travel to meet him and learning that her health was deteriorating he surrendered to the court in February 1897.  Bail was obtained so that he could stay with Athol during her final days.  
   
  Porter was sentenced to five years at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. His pharmacy qualifications got him the job of night druggist.  His sentence also gave him time to write and publish fourteen short stories. In December 1899 in McClure’s Magazine he published a short story as O Henry.  
   
  He was released two years early in July 1901, and reunited with Margaret, now 11, in Pittsburgh.  He now began his most prolific period of writing; a short story per week for the New York World, while also publishing works in other magazines.  Eventually over 600 of his short stories were published. 
   
  Porter was a heavy drinker and in 1908 his health, which had deteriorated for several years, took a dramatic turn for the worse, as did his writing. 
    
  O Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver complicated by diabetes and an enlarged heart on 5th June 1910. 
  1 - O Henry - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction - Volume 1 
  2 - The Gift of the Magi by O Henry 
  3 - A Harlem Tragedy by O Henry 
  4 - According to Their Lights by O Henry 
  5 - After Twenty Years by O Henry 
  6 - Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen by O Henry 
  7 - Transients in Arcadia by O Henry 
  8 - The Cop and the Anthem by O Henry 
  9 - The Caballero's Way by O Henry 
  10 - The Count and the Wedding Guest by O Henry 
  11 - The Dream by O Henry 
  12 - The Furnished Room by O Henry

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  Whitsunday - 1588: A Calendar of...

  Shirley McKay

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  A short story in the historical mystery series featuring a sleuthing lawyer in sixteenth-century St. Andrews, Scotland. When a regent of St. Salvator’s appears to lose his wits, it falls to physician Giles Locke and lawyer Hew Cullan to discern the cause—and to defend the college from the King’s commissioners—in this darkly comic mystery tale in the acclaimed series set in sixteenth-century Scotland. “McKay is to be congratulated for the continued quality and inventiveness of her tales.” —The National

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