Category: Short stories
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If you comment on this post, please avoid the ‘A’ word
Guest post by William Wood When my anthology Stories for Sale was published by Circaidy Gregory Press in 2013 I little suspected the changes to come: changes in my own life and in our geopolitical lives. We now live in a different world. Let me start even further back. When Philippe Delerm published his bestseller…
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Blog of blogs for Earlyworks Press
Greetings to all the authors and friends of Earlyworks Press! I’m sorry for the long silence on the competitions and website fronts. COVID blah blah recession blah blah need to earn a living – you know how it is. For those who signed up to our newsletter for competition news, I’m afraid there isn’t any…
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Back in the days of the desktop publishing explosion, this happened…
Way back before I got involved in publishing, I had developed a fascination for small press books, glorious evidence they are of specialist endeavours that most people will probably never get to hear about. Someone commented once that there were probably more than a few books on my shelves that were the sole surviving copy…
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Stories that travel with you
This short story collection ducks and dives through time and space with the speed of a tap-happy social media surfer. In the opening story, ‘Reading Tolstoy in Barcelona’, a young merchant sailor gets to grips with the world via some extraordinary midnight shore-leave encounters, setting the scene for a series of tales of immigrants and…
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The Several reasons why Finbar’s Father is unique
There’s a story here I read about once a year. It’s unique, and it transports me every time. This book is The Several Deaths of Finbar’s Father & other stories, published in 2014. It’s the anthology of the very best works that came to us through our international competitions the year before. A moment contains…
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Cover Stories
One of the things I loved about working on our short story and poetry anthologies was figuring out how to put the covers together. The contents would be of excellent quality – we published the very best from the shortlists of our annual, international short story competitions, so the quality was guaranteed – but their…
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The kids already know about giants, unicorns, mermaids and dragons, but …
We all know some people are a whole lot more keen to tell their stories than others. All those big hairy mythical creatures – and even some watery ones – were eager to get into the pages of the story books… …but one little creature was better at listening than telling, and whilst you may…
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The Ball of the Future
Not yet born, not yet touched by man, it glows like a mercurial object. But I want to touch it. I want to caress the curvature of its sides and delve into its golden light. I think the inside must be huge and endless, like a stream without end, like an infinite well of possibility.…
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Stocking Fillers for Adults
Let’s go back to the dawn of Earlyworks Press time for today’s ‘Christmas books’ blog. Back then, the press was very much Hastings-based, and the heart and soul of the membership was our Terry Sorby. ‘Porkies’ was very much his plan. A page-turning collection of sizzling jokes, rhymes and mini-stories, it’s just perfect for Christmas…
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The Map of Bihar
Sparkling with humour, singing with empathy and the pains of being human… A skilled, dexterous writer, Janet H Swinney explores her Anglo-Indian connections through this wide ranging and fascinating collection of stories – whether in a fashionable London suburb, urban India or an Edinburgh tenement, we see life chances sought, seized, squandered and subverted. There…
Kay Green 