Tag Archives: Fiction

[A Small Press Life’s Irregular Index of Literary Facts] Debut Novels, Dead Writers Edition: Part One

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Welcome to A Small Press Life’s Irregular Index of Literary Facts, a new feature designed to give lovely order to the random bookish trivia traveling around my brain. If you like lists, mental organization, random facts, or useless trivia about authors famous and obscure, you will definitely want to keep reading.

DEBUT NOVELS, DEAD WRITERS EDITION: PART ONE

The following books represent the first published novels of their respective authors, which were not always the first to be written. All novels are readily available in both traditional and e-reader versions.

  • Louisa May Alcott: Moods
  • Sherwood Anderson: Windy McPherson’s Son
  • Gertrude Atherton: What Dreams May Come
Gertrude Atherton

Gertrude Atherton

  • Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility
  • James Baldwin: Go Tell it on the Mountain
  • Djuna Barnes: Ryder
  • Arna Bontemps: God Sends Sunday: A Novel
  • Elizabeth Bowen: The Hotel
  • Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky
  • Kay Boyle: Plagued by the Nightingale
  • Louis Bromfield: The Green Bay Tree
  • Anne Brontë: Agnes Grey
  • Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
  • Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
  • Pearl S. Buck: East Wind: West Wind
  • Fanny Burney: Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World
  • James M. Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice
  • Truman Capote: Other Voices, Other Rooms
  • Willa Cather: Alexander’s Bridge
  • Kate Chopin: At Fault
  • Agatha Christie: The Mysterious Affair at Styles
  • Colette: Claudine at School
  • Wilkie Collins: Antonina
  • Ivy Compton-Burnett: Dolores
  • Stephen Crane: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
  • Philip K. Dick: Solar Lottery
  • Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Poor Folk
  • Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie
  • George Eliot: Adam Bede
George Eliot

George Eliot

  • William Faulkner: Soldier’s Pay
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise
  • Zelda Fitzgerald: Save Me the Waltz
  • Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
  • Ford Madox Ford: The Shifting of the Fire
  • Zona Gale: Romance Island
  • Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton
  • Andre Gidé: The Notebooks of André Walter
  • Ellen Glasgow: The Descendant
  • Susan Glaspell: The Glory of the Conquered

The Dead Writers Round-Up: March 21st-24th

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  • Robert Southey died on 3/21/1843. “How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgments upon that which seems.” (The Fall of Robespierre; Joan of Arc: An Epic Poem; After Blenheim; Madoc)
  • Caroline Sheridan Norton was born on 3/22/1808. “We have been friends together in sunshine and shade.” (A Voice from the Factories; The Undying One and Other Poems; Stuart of Dunleath)
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died on 3/22/1832. “Character develops itself in the stream of life.” (The Sorrows of Young Werther; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship; Faust)
  • Isabel Burton died on 3/22/1896. “Honour, not honours.” (The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land: from my private journal; Arabia, Egypt, India: a narrative of travel; The Life of Captain Sir Richd F. Burton)
  • Louis L’Amour was born on 3/22/1908. “Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more.” (Silver Canyon; Shalako; The Ferguson Rifle; The Walking Drum)
  • Stendhal died on 3/23/1842. “This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.” (Armance; Lucien Leuwen; The Charterhouse of Parma; Vanina Vanini)
  • William Morris was born on 3/24/1834. “I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.” (The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs; A Dream of John Ball; News from Nowhere (or, An Epoch of Rest); The Water of the Wondrous Isles)
  • Olive Schreiner was born on 3/24/1855. “No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.” (The Story of an African Farm; Stories, Dreams and Allegories; Woman and Labour)
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow died on 3/24/1882. “Music is the universal language of mankind.” (Hyperion, A Romance; Kavanagh; The Song of Hiawatha)
  • Jules Verne died on 3/24/1905. “Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.” (Journey to the Center of the Earth; From the Earth to the Moon; Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; Around the World in Eighty Days; Around the Moon; Off on a Comet)
  • John Millington Synge died on 3/24/1909. “In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.” (In the Shadow of the Glen; Riders to the Sea; The Playboy of the Western World; Deidre of the Sorrows)
Robert Southey, Project Gutenberg
Isabel Burton, 1861
Caroline Sheridan Norton
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by Georg Oswald May, 1779
Stendhal’s grave in Montmartre, Paris
William Morris, Self-portrait, 1856
Olive Schreiner, 1889
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868
Jules Verne
John Millington Synge

Happy Birthday Anton Chekhov, You Sexy Beast

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Anton Chekhov was born on 29 January 1860. In addition to being quite the looker…

Anton Chekhov, 1889

Anton Chekhov, 1889

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…he ranks as one of my favourite writers.

QUOTE: “There is nothing new in art except talent.”

SOME WORKS: The Bear; The Seagull; Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard; The Death of a Government Clerk; The Huntsman; At the Mill; Easter Eve; Grisha; The Bet; The Darling; The Bishop.

A KEEPSAKE:

Anton Chekhov Pocket Mirror by Tartx

Anton Chekhov Pocket Mirror by Tartx. $7.00 USD

 

 

 

Proof That It’s Always About Books

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I received many bookish gifts for Christmas (more on those later). In fact, most of the gifts with my  name on them turned out to be delightfully literary-based. I’m easy to buy for like that. One of the only non-literary themed gifts was from The Chef, who gave me a fancy, shiny, amazing new phone: a Samsung Galaxy S III. It’s heavenly, and I am in love (with both it and my husband). Really, it is perfection. Except, of course, for one small detail. It isn’t bookish enough. My solution? This, dear readers. This.

If it looks familiar, it’s because I wrote about something similar here. I’m over-the-moon with nerdy glee! A plain case would work just as well, but if you can put a bookish spin on something utilitarian…why not?

 

 

 

 

Daily Diversion #73: Long I Stood There*

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Mansion Original

Mansion Original

When I snapped this  image in October, I wasn’t too impressed with the result. It didn’t spark my imagination, which is always a bad sign. I was in a hurry and used my camera phone, which was zoomed in a bit too much. Even though this house has stories to tell, I didn’t feel any of them that day. My creativity felt closed off. Since I’m a writer, and not a photographer, it’s normal if I am not immediately able to capture a visual; I tuck everything away until the time is right. I’m familiar enough with this house, which is in my home city, to know that the intuitive call to my creative process would happen, eventually and beautifully.

After a conversation with Jennifer from Quirk’n It, I decided to wade through the 1300+ photos on my phone. When I saw this one, it struck me differently than it did two months ago. I was playing around with some effects, when it hit me: for the last few months, I’ve been writing a short story featuring this house in triplicate. The house is not the star, nor was it the impetus for the piece, but it’s there just the same: altered, transformed, re-imagined into something else. All before I took the photograph. Remembered from previous glimpses, from some unremembered or unnoticed tucking away.

 

Mansion Original Version
Mansion-Altered Version # 1: Because my story is a bit eerie, I chose effects that dimmed the mansion’s bright, well-kept beauty.
Mansion-Altered Version #2: It’s beginning to look as if scary things could happen here.
Mansion-Altered Version #3: Or, perhaps they already did.
Mansion-Altered Version #4-You should probably turn around and leave, before it is too late.
“No one would know if you went pokin’ around the back with your camera. It’s a real boneyard back there, too. Kind of like the insides of a museum was tossed outside and left to rot. There’s beauty in everything, I suppose. Even in neglect.”**

*”Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”-Edgar Allan Poe

**This is an excerpt from my short story, The Brothers’ Boneyard. No stealing, please.

 

 

 

Shopping for the Bookworm: Robert Louis Stevenson Edition

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Grab your favourite beverage, sit back, and enjoy looking at these Robert Louis Stevenson themed goods!

Robert Louis Stevenson Quote-Letterpress Art Print by tag team tompkins

Robert Louis Stevenson Quote-Letterpress Art Print by tag team tompkins-$8.00

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson at 4Get-Me-Not Treasures Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson at 4Get-Me-Not Treasures-$18.00 Continue reading →