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A woman grows increasingly frustrated by the emails she receives from her deceased husband… A taxidermist dreams of bringing one of his clients into his workshop after preserving her grandfather’s hamster… A grieving nurse is troubled by her daughter’s fascination with The Iron Lady… In her stirring and disquieting debut collection of stories, Sarah Schofield explores emotions that seethe beneath the surface of ourselves and live in the spaces that language can’t reach, elevating manifestations of loneliness, grief and disconnection into direct sight. The characters we meet in Safely Gathered In harness objects around them, both manmade and of the natural world, to deal with secr...
Sophie Westacott had it all, a celebrity boyfriend, an inner-city Sydney terrace, a great job at a top-tier law firm, and invitations to A-list events within the tight clique of Sydney's Beautiful People. But it all slips away when her boyfriend, Connor Bayles, Channel 8's newsreader, breaks up with her, leaving Sophie to wonder how she ever thought they were the perfect couple. After eight years of being out of Sydney's dating scene and faced with a barrage of websites, events, and apps, she wonders how she'll ever find someone. A visit to her grandmother on the family farm in southern Tasmania, reveals a long-held family secret, one that will help focus her search. Sophie comes to believe the man of her dreams is born on the 11th of April, and with the help of her friends, she jumps onto a roller coaster ride of parties and dates trying to find him. A funny and heart-breaking adventure of what one woman will do to find the right man!
SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.
We know Stanislaw Lem, whether or not we consciously know that we do. He may only be recognised in the West as the author of the twice-filmed novel, Solaris, but the influence of his other work is legion. From computer games (The Sims was inspired by one of his short stories), to films (the red and blue pills of The Matrix owe much to his Futurological Congress); from the space comedies of Red Dwarf to the metaphysical satires of Douglas Adams... the presence of this masterly Polish writer can be traced far and wide. Nor was his genius confined to fiction. Lem's essays and pseudo-essays borne out of the military industrial tensions of the Cold War have outlived their original context and spe...
A collection of 145 letters written to Hannah Fells Wilson Roberts from 35 correspondents, containing over 1,000 unique family names, written between 1850 and 1860, and transcribed with original spellings and annotated markings by C. B. Frederick. They tell the story of Quaker life in rural counties near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. These letters reveal the local history of Bucks, Chester, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties and the increasingly dominant trend of women's participation in the pre-Civil War society. Hannah Fells Wilson was born in 1828 to George Maris Wilson (1780-1866) and Sarah Fells Schofield (1802-1866) and raised in Gwynedd, Montgomery County. The letters end the year after her marriage to Guy Roberts in 1859. Of special interest are letters from Martha Schofield, who would later found the first school for black boys in South Carolina in 1868, although that endeavor is not mentioned in this collection.
In 1844 a diverse group of working men banded together in an attempt to improve their own lives by acting for themselves instead of relying on others. They formed the Rochdale Equitable Pioneer Society and opened a store in Toad Lane which was to be run on the ideals of honest weights and unadulterated food. In the 172 years since its establishment, many stories, myths and misconceptions have arisen. This richly researched book offers a unique study into the lives of the individuals themselves and highlights differences in many of the commonly held beliefs about the Pioneers. The latter half of the book includes a complete transcription of the original Minutes of the Society from 1844 to 1851.