Showing results by narrator "Ghizela Rowe" in All Categories

Once more the year begins. The first month of the Gregorian calendar. Cold winds howl, the landscape shivers, frost, snow, ice are the many blankets for the land. Daylight is thin; it arrives late and leaves early, ceding the hours to shadow and the ink of night. From the pens of our remarkable poets, including Shelley, Dickenson, Shakespeare, Whitman, Gilbran and a wealth of others, come sumptuous verse that describe our moods, feelings, travels and desires of the dawning year.

Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson was born on 22nd September 1847 in Barnes, London. In 1876 she married Wilfred Meynell, the newspaper publisher and editor, and together they set up and published a number of magazines as well as publishing the initial works of several poets including Francis Thompson. As the new century dawned, she along with many other artists began to question the colonial needs of Empire with its segregation and oppression. In particular she sought and gained a role in the Women’s Suffrage movement as it attempted to obtain greater equality for women.

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.

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."

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.

Stephen Crane was born 1st November, 1871 in Newark, New Jersey and was the eighth surviving child out of fourteen. Incredibly he began writing at the age of four and was published several times by the age of sixteen.

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born on 1st April 1809 to a father, descended from Ukrainian Cossacks and a mother with a military background in the Ukrainian town of Sorochyntsi, then part of the Russian Empire and rich in Cossack traditions and folklore. Gogol had a profound and enduring impact on literature which can be evidenced from his masterpiece, "The Cloak", more popularly although wrongly translated as "The Overcoat" published in 1841. A hundred years later Vladamir Nabokov called it ‘The greatest Russian short story ever written'.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. His classic "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" carefully pulls apart the relationship between two cousins one hot summer. Something has to give and with Fitzgerald its an absolute certainty that the brittle lives of young women finally snap in unique ways.

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.

Willa Sibert Cather had Welsh ancestry but like her parents Charles and Mary, was born in Virginia, on 7th December 1873. Acknowledged as one of America's greatest writers’ further honours flowed. In 1943 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. A determinedly private person, Cather destroyed many old drafts, personal papers, and letters. Her will would also restrict the ability of scholars to quote from personal papers that remained.

Willa Sibert Cather was born on 7th December, 1873 on her grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. After several years and moves the family eventually settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska and for the first time Cather could now attend school. In Red Cloud, Cather had her earliest writings published in the local Red Cloud Chief newspaper. Her time in the mid-West created a vivid tranche of experiences for the young woman.

Elizabeth Stevenson was born in Chelsea in London on 29th September 1810. Both parents embedded their strong Unitarian beliefs into Elizabeth who rebelliously was often reluctant to display these religious convictions. The early death of Elizabeth’s mother saw her sent away to be brought up by her maternal aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire. Her father remarried but Elizabeth spent most of her childhood in Cheshire away from her father and his new family. Elizabeth’s aunt encouraged her education and particularly to read and express herself through writing.

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.

This volume pays tribute to 50 different women poets, some well-known whilst others undeservedly forgotten but all contributing a single poem which we hope might nudge listeners to discover more of their verse.

The ninth month of the Gregorian calendar strides onto stage with the autumn equinox and the first glimpses of a new season. Nature may adorn the coming days with a blaze of Indian summer, or the early showers and storms of autumn may begin their symphony. Regardless of Nature’s elemental whims the landscape is a riot of colours, hues and swathes, the harvest of crops continues, the orchards heave with bounty.

During the Victorian era the publishing of magazines and periodicals accelerated at a phenomenal rate. This really was mass market publishing to a hungry audience eager for literary sustenance. Many of our greatest authors contributed and expanded their reach whilst many fledging authors also found a ready source for their nascent works and careers. Amongst the very many was ‘The Yellow Book’.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author? Ambrose Bierce is an author whose words take us one way and then send us another. These miniature masterpieces all have a central truth and plausibility that seems to vanish in an ending that can be anything from wry, to shocking to hallucinatory.

Richard Thomas Gallienne was born in Liverpool on 20th January, 1866. His first job was in an accountant's office, but this was quickly abandoned to pursue his first love as a professional writer. His first work, My Ladies’ Sonnets, was published in 1887. In 1889 he became, for a brief time, literary secretary to Wilson Barrett the manager, actor, and playwright. Barrett enjoyed immense success with the staging of melodramas, which would later reach a peak with the historical tragedy The Sign of the Cross (1895).

Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Kate Chopin. These three names thrill the literary world as well as our own. They have gravitas, they have knowledge, experience and they have the literary style and panache to seduce our imagined world. Each has written a short story on pleasured lips placed on another’s flesh. For Chekhov it was a kiss in a darkened room that happened by mistake. Who was she? For Chopin it was a kiss that almost derailed a hoped-for marriage proposal. Why did he do that? For de Maupassant it was a niece seeking advice from her Aunt on when to kiss and whom. And did she?

Katherine Tynan was born on January 23rd, 1859, into a large farming family in Clondalkin, County Dublin, and educated at a convent school in Drogheda. Her output was prolific; some sources have her as the author of almost a 100 novels. Here we concentrate on her poetry. Amongst the classics such as ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ are numerous war poems. She is now sometimes grouped amongst the War Poets of the First World War.