Résultats Éditeur "Deadtree Publishing" dans Fiction de genre

Franz Kafka was born on 3rd July 1883, in Prague, then in Bohemia, the eldest of 6, into a middle-class Jewish family. His literary works are few in number but towering in influence. His masterpieces include ‘The Trial’, ‘The Metamorphosis’ as well as a number of short stories which reveal facets of humankind that truthfully could only be born from Kafka’s brain and pen. His classic short story ‘In the Penal Colony’ begins with the innocuous words “It’s a peculiar apparatus,” as the Officer explains to the Traveller, what this grisly machine will do to the prisoners who serve their time here.

Robert William Chambers was born on 26th May 1865 in Brooklyn. His best-known work is ‘The King in Yellow’ (1895), a highly vivid collection of Art Nouveau short stories. These stories are woven together by the theme of a fictitious drama of the same title, which drives those who read it insane. ‘The Repairer of Reputations’ from ‘The King in Yellow’ is a mind-bending and disruptive story that adds just enough reality that the unreal elements seem totally at home in the descent to chaos.

Zona Gale was born on 26th August 1874, in Portage, Wisconsin. Her first novel ‘Romance Island’ was published in 1906 and she also began the popular ‘Friendship Village’ series of stories. In 1920 came ‘Miss Lulu Bett’, which depicts life in the Midwest. Adapted into a play it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. It was a stellar achievement.

Louisa May Alcott was born on 29th November 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Well-loved for her classic ‘Little Women’, she was a superb writer in difficult times for any woman, a strong advocate of women’s issues, the anti-slavery movement, temperance and social reform. Her work often reflects on the rich experiences in her life and these poignant short stories are a fine testament to this. One of Alcott’s most startling stories is the ‘The Brothers’, a tale of two brothers during the Civil War and the after-effects.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died. Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. Amongst F. Scott Fitzgerald's many short story gems is ‘The Four Fists’. It follows a life, from boyhood to maturity, and how an occasional brush with physical force influences and changes that life.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on 4th July 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, a town synonymous with the earlier Salem Witch Trials. It was instrumental in Hawthorne’s later use of American Gothic and dark romanticism in his writing. The Birthmark is a classic tale from Hawthorne’s pen. Georgina has a small red birthmark on her cheek. Her husband, a brilliant scientist and philosopher, becomes obsessed with what he thinks is this blemish on her beauty.

Pearl Zane Grey was born on 31st January 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio. From an early age, he was intrigued by history, fishing, baseball, and writing. Grey was an avid reader of adventure stories, consuming dime store novels by the dozen. His first magazine article, about one of his fishing expeditions, was published in 1902. It was not until 1910 that he wrote his first Western, ‘The Heritage of the Desert’. It was a breakthrough title and quickly became a bestseller.

Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was born on 21st August in Oryol, Russia, to a middle-class family of Polish, Ukranian and Finnish ancestry. In 1898 his first short story ‘Bargamot and Garaska’, published in the ‘Kurier’ newspaper, caught the attention and friendship of Maxim Gorky. His first collection of short stories appeared in 1901 and sold over a quarter of a million copies. He was a sensation. His classic story ‘Silence’ is a haunting and a desperately sad account of a family broken by death and unable to reconcile their feelings.

Aleksander Głowacki, who wrote under the nom de plume Boleslaw Prus, was born on 20th August 1847 at Hrubieszów in the Kingdom of Poland, at that time, controlled by the Russian Empire. It seems he had doubts as to the scale of his talents and early on adopted the name ‘Boleslaw Prus’, for both his journalistic and literary offerings. His work as a short-story writer met with much acclaim. He wrote several dozen of them, originally published in newspapers and ranging in length from micro-story to novella. His keen observation of everyday life and sense of humor are evident in them.

Occasionally an author appears who, in a short career, emblazons a legacy so bright and so distinct, as well as popular, that it is difficult to believe it is the output of only one man. Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was such a talent. Over the course of his prolific career, Stevenson had not only given his audience many classic novels but beautiful poetry such as ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ and many short stories as with his dark classic of Christmas Day ‘Markheim’ (1884).

Christmas may come but once a year but human emotions, the driving force of our characters, are with us every day. Yet, somehow these same emotions when they happen at Christmas seem amplified; we seem more tender to their touch, their words. In this volume we take the verse and poems of our classic poets and put them alongside our short story masters to reveal a Christmas that everyone remembers and that everyone wants to be part of.

Christmas may come but once a year but evil, intrigue and malevolence are everyday events. Within this volume Christmas is a time when these dark forces form and coalesce to take life and liberty from people who may and who may not deserve the spin of its wheel. Some are merely evil, others have the beginnings of a conscience that displays itself in a dialogue with the devil, or perhaps only themselves. But, in this volume Christmas takes a ringside seat to the horrors of the human heart.

Christmas may come but once a year but human emotions, the driving force of our characters, are with us every day. Yet, somehow these same emotions when they happen at Christmas seem amplified; we seem more tender to their touch, their words. Whether it’s a long-lost returning soldier wondering how best to return to the arms of his family without too great a risk of shock... Or a prodigal son whose taken path has driven pain into his own and others hearts… These stories reveal much about the human condition.

Edward Everett Hale was born on April 3rd, 1822, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a prodigy, gifted with extraordinary literary skills. At only 13 he graduated from Boston Latin School and enrolled at Harvard College. There, he settled in with the literary set, won two Bowdoin prizes and was elected Class Poet. He graduated in 1839. His literary career started quite late. It wasn’t until 1859 that he was first published in the Atlantic with his short story "My Double and How He Undid Me." In 1863 the Atlantic published perhaps his best-known work "The Man Without a Country."

Alice Ruth Moore was born on 19th July 1875 in New Orleans where she was part of the multi-racial Creole community. She was the first generation seemingly born free after the Civil War and unusually for the times, obtained a university education which led to her becoming a teacher at a public school in New Orleans. Alice Dunbar Nelson was a natural and gifted writer across many genres, from novels, essays, plays to diaries, criticism, poetry and of course short stories, of which ‘The Stones in the Village’ is a fine example.

O Henry is perhaps the master of the American short story across his 600 works. Slices of life, vignettes of narrative are told with verve and poise and words that simply flow as he wanders through society revealing characters and stories of instant appeal.

Born on 14th January 1866 the only details that can be confirmed are that he wrote the short story "Second Thoughts" and co-authored two works with Ernest Dowson. From there we only have the year of his death – 1934. The story unfolds around a man returning home to England after almost twenty years away and finds things have changed that leave him both unsettled and unsure of how to move forward. Seeing, by chance, an old friend reawakens his curiosity...and hopes.