Category: Short stories
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Talk of the Village
When when word got around that William Wood had put together a whole story collection inspired by snapshots of life in the village where he lived, some people were a bit worried. “Am I in it?” “You didn’t write about what happened to X, did you?” “Where do you get your ideas from?” — A…
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Curséd Be Boulangism
Set aside all your tired arguments for using cash and relearning the art of stepping outside without a Smartphone. You’re absolutely right, but doesn’t it get a bit boring, arguing for the bleedin’ obvious, on everything from privacy and the NHS to trying to stop a genocide? Take a short break, pop down to the…
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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…
Kay Green
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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.…