A boy hibernates with an owl.

A man in hospital remembers his past.

An unhappy woman invites her family to church.

A man is caught in the act.

Post existential humanist writing, creative photography, in depth look into the chaos of human relationships.

From "On meeting A Dead Body" Deep Surfing Alligator sailing through the blue ripples like they were made for you but never fear because it's here soon you will feel the wrestle, that familiar vessel, of which you thought you'd gotten rid....

Poetry 1 Death And Rebirth/Once Upon A Time 2 Waiting For You 11 On Meeting A Dead Body 16 Worms 18 Healing 19 We Walked With Lions Short Fiction 3 Darien...

Επιλογή διηγημάτων από το έργο "Νουβέλες της Πεσκάρας" του Ιταλού συγγραφέα και ποιητή Γκαμπριέλε Ντ' Ανούντσιο. Selected short stories from the book "Le novelle della Pescara" of the Italian writter Gabriele D' Annunzio....

Οι ειδωλολάτρες,Το ξαγρύπνισμα του νεκρού,Ο θάνατος του δούκα της Οφένα, Ο περατάρης, Το τέλος της Κάντια, Η κασέλα, Ο Τουρλεντάνα επιστρέφει, Ο θαλασσινός χειρουργός. The returne of Turlendana, The idolaters, The downfall o Candia, The death of the duke of Ofena ecc. ...

* Sixteen-year-old Ned Scoletti is travelling north on a Greyhound bus from Fort Pierce, Florida to Spaulding, Massachusetts, to visit Aunt Josie. Problem is, his mother’s identical twin sister died when Nick was just a toddler. Or did she? * Jesse Caldwell, an auto mechanic, is painfully shy, lives at home and hates his moronic life. Miranda Huffington suffers from a gimpy leg and equally stunted personality. This is not your standard Harlequin romance. * Bartholomew Schroeder, a recent widower and retired plumber, can sweat pipes and fix broken toilets, but, on a weekend excursion to Martha's Vineyard, can he mend a teenage girl's broken spirit? * Maria Santos, who just bought the Breakfast Nook, knows nothing about cross-contamination, pest control, immersion gauges or reduced-oxygen packaging. The new health inspector is every restaurant owner’s worse nightmare, but Maria needn’t worry. She’s got an ace up her culinary sleeve. These are just a few of the situations you will find in this collection of bittersweet short stories, where the characters struggle to manage their lives in a user-unfriendly universe ...

* Lenny slept with Elsie McGivney, a woman so dim-witted she can't make change or hold down an entry-level job. Lenny bedded the chucklehead but got no sex in the bargain. So why is he going back for more? * Bethany Glaspell approached the first-ever meeting with Great-uncle Vern, a man who returned from the jungles of Vietnam with a Hmong bride and warped personality, much as a cat burglar might plan his next heist, telling no one, neither friend nor family, her intentions. * There are five levels of gifted intelligence ranging from bright to profoundly gifted. One in every thirty thousand is 'exceptional', which makes Curtis Stedman, the part-time dishwasher at Nagel’s Bagels, one smart cookie! * Tawana Saunders is writing the great American novel. Problem is, six months into the project, she’s only got a rough draft plus three lousy paragraphs. These are just a few of the situations you will find in this collection of bittersweet short stories, where the characters struggle to manage their lives in a user-unfriendly universe. ...

* A young boy spends a magical weekend with his sister, a former collegiate track star crippled in a freak accident. During the visit he learns a poignant lesson about the resilience of monarch butterflies and the human heart * Mrs. Chowdhary named her youngest daughter after Saint Theresa, the Little Flower of Jesus. Unfortunately, Terry has more in common with Attila the Hun than her nineteenth century namesake. * Marcie Callahan’s parents run around the house in their underwear. They belch and fart and do all sorts of gross and disgusting things. The Callahan clan doesn't have a stitch of class, culture, brains or social graces, which is why Marcie is ready for a change. * Dick wants fun. He has no dog. He has no cat. No Spot. No Puff. But he has a plan. See Dick board the plane. See Dick fly away. Far, far away. Hello happiness! Goodbye Jane These are just a few of the situations you will find in this collection of bittersweet short stories, where the characters struggle to manage their lives in a user-unfriendly universe. ...

* Grace Paulson’s train wreck of a personal life takes a turn for the better when the elementary school teacher meets a gifted artisan whose handmade jewelry boxes are featured at the local museum. Well-versed in nineteenth century Russian literature, Carl Solomon also happens to be the school janitor. * Following his divorce, Dr. Stanley Gilford, chief of cardiology at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, restructured his life on the guiding principle of maximum gain, minimum pain. So what is the well-heeled doctor doing with Ruby, a high school dropout and waitress at the local greasy spoon, and what are his options visa vie the pallid, five year old boy whose damaged heart beats in three-four time? * A year out of high school, Clarissa, who couldn't even score a date for the senior prom, is into tantric sex, Pablo Neruda and orgasms bordering on divine rapture. And she's still a virgin! * While studing to become a rabbi at a yeshivah in Jersusalem, Peter Ostrowski witnesses a senseless act of violence that causes him to abandon the religious life. When he stumbles across the writings of Leo Pinsker, an equally disaffected seventeent...

AVoD is a long, short story ​full of pizzazz​ and physics​; perfect for the reader who can appreciate delusions of grandeur and stomach words such as tensors and geodesics....

La firma Auladian Asesores explota a sus empleados. Muchos padecen estrés crónico por la sobrecarga de trabajo, los horarios interminables, los menosprecios por parte del jefe y el temor constante a ser despedidos por cualquier nimiedad. Nuestro protagonista es un ejecutivo de la firma que sufre como el que más los abusos y desvaríos de Vicente, el jefe. En un momento dado, las cosas se ponen feas y es despedido. En los peores años de la crisis, se verá obligado a deambular por el mundo de los portales de empleo, las entrevistas, los cazatalentos... Hasta que se presenta una tentadora oportunidad, una encrucijada cuyo desenlace cambiará su vida para siempre....

 Pearl Singleton, a forest ranger at the Pemberton Wildlife Preserve, is going to show eighteen year old Shawn Mariano her Osborne Smoke Finder, all six varieties of New England ferns, a beaver dam, and something he never bargained for.  A straight-laced ex-nun must decide what to do with a stolen Sony Trinitron TV. The arrival of a Russian Jew in the apartment complex where she lives resolves the matter of the ’hot’ TV while opening another can of existential worms.  When Ronda Wickford, the assistant manager of Brandenburg’s ShopRite Supermarket, inadvertently hires a middle-age man with a PhD in philosophy to run the fresh produce department, weird things begin to happen. As events unfold, she learns a thing or two about Wittgenstein’s linguistic theories, common decency and how to fix a leaky faucet.  Marie Augustin, an Haitian nurses aide, is blindsided when one of her elderly clients asks her to accompany him on a trip to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform in Tanglewood. Does the green-card immigrant, who witnessed first hand the endemic violence in her native country, follow agency protocol or bend rules to acc...

Seventeen year-old Laurel Evers is running off to a fictional village in rural Maine in search of an idyllic existence that hasn’t existed since the era of the horse and buggy. Life was simpler, idyllic then. People meandered about in horse-drawn wagons, fished, grew their own potato crops and made throat lozenges from locally-grown spearmint boiled in metal cauldrons over the stove. Women braided floor mats from swamp-grown rushes, and even fashioned sandals from those very same pliable plants. The Civil War was a recent memory not some moldy, historical trivia and neighbors were more 'civil' or at least it seemed that way. ...

Misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance – Jason Flanagan needs to make restitution for a crime committed fifteen years earlier. Problem is, the moral indiscretion isn’t punishable in any court of law....

Involution & Evolution is an anti-war novel focussing on Alfred Freeman, a World War One conscientious objector whose character is based on Jesus and Buddha. It stabs away at the hypocrisy at the centre of modern religion and politics, in a uniquely rhythmic and colourful manner....

Cupertino Story is a vivid and mesmerizing tale of troubled adolescents and misfits - a harrowing and perceptive fiction debut from a promising new literary voice. This raw and ominous portrait of a lost generation traces the lives of teenagers and their experiments with vices of all kinds, struggles with family and one another, as they succumb to passivity, self destructive and often heartless nihilism. Stevo lives in a world of casual privilege, acute moral entropy and reckless abandon. The weight of his older brother’s mysterious disappearance begins to permeate through his everyday life. After writing a disturbing school essay he’s put into therapy and given anti depressants. He’s continuously entranced by a mysterious new girl at school named Holly who may or may not be a high class call girl. His best friend Drake’s repressed homosexual bent becomes more evident with their drug induced adventures. The dizzying whirlwind of desperation takes Stevo through relentless parties in dot com villas, seedy bars, Santa Cruz bonfires, and also into the lesser known world of Silicon Valley after dark. Set in Szymanowski’s hometown,...

I swallow two Ritalins and see dark circles under my eyes in the reflection. Foam is forming and spilling from my mouth, splashing in the sink and getting on my jeans. The TV says the winds have pulled trees from the ground and flipped over cars, and roofs of houses have been torn off. They advise people to stay indoors if they can. There is too much danger outside in these harsh conditions, they say, and then a commercial comes on about ten dollar oil changes at Jiffy Lube. The branches of the tree outside the bathroom are swinging and whipping at the window and house so loud that my mom screams. In the reflection, my mom passes with a coffee mug in hand and a long coat on. She says this is the worst time to be remodeling and is complaining about the cold, about how the heater should work soon but the workers keep rescheduling because of the weather. Where is the remote? she yells. I can’t remember where I put the damn remote. The foam keeps collecting and spilling out of my mouth. I open my mouth wide and spit it all out so it splatters on the mirror and the sides of the sink and onto my stomach and in the foamy spit there are s...

This novel is based on the plot that describes the life of a young lady having worked as Assistant Professor at the University level. These days, she is engaged by a Trust, interested in promoting `mental illumination through peace of mind and self-confidence. She is going places to deliver lectures, keep in mind the aims of the organization as well as the composition of the audiences. In fact, since her infancy she is on the move from one part of India to another, even having no idea of the identity of the couple who parented her. Having been reared up by a domestic maid, she was obliged to inherit this type of job to earn for her livelihood. The onset of puberty in the proximity of unrelated men was to be withstood with caution and care for her chastity. These tours of lecturing around, once make her find a known lady in her audience in Delhi. This incident opens her the way to meet many people in this big city and take her to the person who fathered her. Here, she also gets the truthful information about her mother....

Dear Madhu Ji, On my way back home I recapitulated, as my routine exercise, the discussions at the Coffee House. Can you recall the reaction of Mr Malik to Lal's outburst against the final outcome of Dhananjay Chakrovarty's legal battle to ward off the Capital punishment pronounced on him for rape and murder of a minor girl, when he himself was just 21 years? ……………..." I suppose Mr. Malik came out with some amusing retort, which made almost the entire group at the table giggle and I could not make out anything but only observe Mr. Malik move towards the toilets. Respected Sir, I clearly heard your `Guruji`, I mean Mr Malik, murmur aloud, “Is there any punishment available to your civilized society to punish an errant woman who voluntarily and actively seduces and commits rape on an innocent, uninitiated and in the prime of his youth?” “Do you mean a rape amongst a Lesbian fraternity?” Mr. Lal Singh speaks out smilingly. Mr. Malik simply hung his head down and spoke in his normal pitch, “I mean, on a companion belonging to the opposite sex.” Having uttered these words Guruji peacefully got up and moved in a gentle pace towards pu...

This is the philosophical novel that was my Master's degree thesis

Steven, you should DEFINITELY continue to give your life to . . . literary novels (notice I omitted “obscure”).  What you have produced is a phenomenal work.  Others, in the past, have attempted to do something like you have done, but they did not come close to creating a work with such breadth and depth as you.   I apologize for taking so very long to complete the reading of your work, but it is very densely written in some sections, while others seem to be as lucid as anything I have ever read.  Your vocabulary probably exceeds my own (“fulgurant”), for which I am thankful, as I always enjoy being taught the existence of words I have not yet incorporated into my own lexicon.   The most successful parts of your work—for me—were the interactions between Luk, Aus, and the central character, as those passages moved the story along.  I think using the unrest and waging of police action in Bangkok sets up the intellectual discontent in the rest of the novel, but I would wish for a more balanced unfolding of the story with the intellectual ruminations.  The least successful passages for me were sometimes extremely lengthy sen...

These Details in Preference to Nothing is the story of a relationship, or rather it’s a meditation on one, that is, a mediation on love, faith and an existence caught in transition told from a perspective not fully capable of seeing all angles. The narrative is in the first person and in the present tense as is every love affair between very young adults. The title sums up a lot—These Details in Preference to Nothing—a line lifted from Becket. To quote John Barth “heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity.” A story told in intense moments of meditative stupor, it sometimes reads more like poetry, and so it began as an extended sonnet sequence, but emerged into this record—to be added to all the others throughout history--of the truth in the sincere and authentic passion of the young, or at least some of the relevant and more illustrative details. ISBN: 978-1-932023-36-7. https://www.facebook.com/williamralpheditions...

I have begun every impulse to speak with hesitation, suspended on the edge of doubt, mindful of my inability to say how it was. It was the year of the roar of lions, humid nights, the soft breaths of waterweeds and kisses. It was the first year alone with my son. I had always had enemies of my sleep. I had come to know them. My response was always hesitation. The world was very large. It was true that a specific combination of things often conspired to lead my telling what happened back to an ecstasy of memories of melancholy and through a long, long night. Saudade the Portuguese say, the sadness inside each joy. All my life I have been haunted by a dream of heaven.  It was true. For me, anyway, for the way I told things, and the way I have always told them. I was somewhat absent of myself where the words came to carry the telling from me. I was touched by the words the way the butterfly wants to be still in the hands of the breeze, to be untangled from the air that makes the soft current, carries the preliminary push, something unformed and unclear, to be unsnarled from the waft, to be unfurled as the sound from the trees, to be...

These Details in Preference to Nothing About the Author Also from William Ralph Press