Books on Short Stories: Enjoy Brevity and Variety

By Anuradha Malhotra

In the words of Edgar Allan Poe: "A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must be build towards it."

You are about to set out on a journey all alone and have no clue on how to kill time on your way- get your hands on a book of short stories. With a companion like this, you will be surprised how quickly the time flies. Each sip of your favorite coffee can be made more stimulating with an interesting short story. Relaxing in your bathtub, reading a short-and-sweet love tale can be a sensual experience. Read aloud to your kids a short fantasy tale every night and see the spark gleaming on their cute faces. Such books are easily available online and at discount prices.

What kind of books on short stories available on portals?

Most of the such stories genre that you find on online bookstores are those that fit into every age-group and interest. For kids and young adults, they have fairy tales and adventure stories. Then, for adults, there are books on themes like love, sex, and erotica. Also get to see their collection of short fiction, non-fiction, inspirational, classic, horror, funny, moral, mystery, and crime-based ones.

Why such books are so popular

Brevity Saves Time: When you do not have time for reading a voluminous thing with countless pages, attempting a quickie such as a short tale is a good option. Reading stories that are spread to just a few pages of a book makes them immensely popular among book-enthusiasts. You don't have to sit for hours wait for the last page to know how it ends; on the other hand, a single long plot that may just drag and drag, and put your patience to test. A book on short stories, can be finished in a day or two, or even hours.
Variety Makes Them Interesting: Such books reflect different moods and styles; this makes them interesting to read. Readers always get turn on by variety as presented by a bunch of stories put together.
Kill Free Time: Reading them is a perfect way of spending the free hours that you have at your hand. Order these books online and the same shall delivered right at your doorstep.

Recommended Books:

The Best American Short Stories 2011 (By: Geraldine Brooks and Heidi Pitlor)
PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011: The Best Stories of the Year (By: Laura Furman)
A Treasure Trove of Short Stories Workbook: A Collection of Short Stories (By: S. Chakravarthi, R.S. Gupta)
The Cabulliwalah and other Stories (By: R.N. Tagore)
Gotta Have It: 60 Stories of Sudden Sex (By: Rachel Kramer Bussel)

LSNet ( http://www.lsnet.in ) is a book portal that sells books from different genres at discount prices. The books are made available to users right at their doorstep and that too without any shipping charges. The members of LSNet.in can also get to share books for a limited period and free of cost. They can also sell their personal collections via online bidding process.

Newspaper Greats: A Humbling Experience for Serious Journalists

By Geri Spieler

In a world of perishable correspondence, I fear we will lose precious writings to the Internet.

Some would argue that the electronic world allows us to save writing in perpetuity unlike in the physical world -- I hope so. Then we can accumulate such writings as we have in this journalistic candy store of Deadline Artists: Scandals, Tragedies and Triumphs -- More of America's Greatest Newspaper Columns.

The book is written in the form of an anthology with contributors that include H. L. Mencken, Will Rogers, Jimmy Breslin, Art Buchwald, William F. Buckley Jr., Molly Ivins, Ernest Hemingway, Maureen Dowd, Nora Ephron, Carl Hiaasen, Walter Lippmann, George Will, Mike Ryoko, Dorothy Thompson, Richard Wright, Damon Runyon, Peggy Noonan, Mike Barnicle and more.

All are icons of the great world of newspaper columnists that brought a rich reflection on the sign of the times.

The editors of the book -- John Avlon, Jesse Angelo and Errol Louis -- all bring years of journalistic experience and talent to the table.

The chapters are divided in three sections: scandals, tragedies, and triumphs -- although it was difficult to discern the decisions of which piece should categorize triumphs.

Samples of each are indeed compelling. The articles span the years as early as Jack London's account of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, "The Story of an Eyewitness," for Collier's to the 2011 Bret Stephens eulogy on his father in "A Lesson Before Dying" for the Wall Street Journal in December 2011.

There are heartbreaking scandal pieces such as Henry G. Wales' account of when Mata Hari faced her firing squad, "Mata Hari Falls Before Firing Squad, International News Service." Wales described in detail Mata Hari's bravery in rejecting the blindfold and bounds.

"She stood gazing steadfastly at her executioners, when the priest, the nuns, and her lawyer stepped away from her."

There are tragedies as horrific in "There Is No News from Auschwitz" by A. M. Rosenthal for the New York Times in 1958:

Brzezinka, Poland--
And so there is no news to report about Auschwitz. There is merely the compulsion to write something about it, a compulsion that grows out of a restless feeling that to have visited Auschwitz and then turned away without having said or written anything would somehow be a most grievous act of discourtesy to those who died here.

There are uplifting articles that bear witness to triumph over diversity. Mike Royko wrote about the first time Jackie Robinson stepped onto Wrigley Field in "Jackie's Debut" for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1972. Royko wrote this reminiscence on the day of Jackie Robinson's death. He remembered discussion back then that a black baseball player would ruin baseball forever:

When Robinson stepped into the batter's box, it was as if someone had flicked a switch. The place went silent.

He swung at the first pitch and they erupted as if he had knocked it over the wall. But it was only a high foul that dropped into the box seats. I remember thinking it was strange that a foul make that many people happy.

Where would journalism be without the cutting edge, literary knife-wielding humor of Molly Ivins. Ivins had a way of tapping out laser sharp awareness with clarity unlike any other writer's.

When funding for AIDS was brought to the ballot box in Texas, the opposition became obstreperous. Ivins had her say in her inimitable style in "Ignorance Epidemic During AIDS Crisis" for the Forth Worth Star-Telegram in 1992:

What is this? Dog days of August? Full Moon? Stars in strange alignment? We all know there are still slope-browed, egg-sucking ridge runners out in the hills who believe that only homosexuals get AIDS and it serves them right.

Deadline Artists is an excellent book for those interested in the journalism greats, both past and reasonably contemporary. It should be required reading for journalism majors.

A Wonderful Read

By Douglas Cobb

Debut author, Freddie Owens, swings for the fences and hits a home run with his excellent coming-of-age story set primarily in Kentucky, Then Like the Blind Man. When Orbie's father dies, his life changes forever. His mother, Ruby, finds herself attracted to the smooth-talking, poetic atheist Victor Denalsky, who had been Orbie's father's foreman at a steel mill in Detroit. After Orbie's father dies, Victor courts Orbie's mother, and eventually marries her. Not wanting to nor desiring to take care of a nine-year-old boy with an attitude, like Orbie, who can't stand his stepfather, anyway, Ruby and Victor decide to drop Orbie off at Ruby's parents' house in Kentucky, with the promise that they'll come back to get him once they've settled in Florida, where Victor supposedly has a job lined up. Orbie's mother and Victor take with them Orbie's younger sister, Missy.

The novel is told in the first person by Orbie, who, though young, is very insightful for his age. As I read, I was often reminded of another famous novel told from the POV of a child, Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird. The themes are different, but Orbie's and Scout's perspectives on African Americans in the 1950′s are significant to understanding both books. Orbie has some bad experiences with some of the black people he comes in contact with early on in the novel, so he calls them the "n," word at various points in the story.

Through the course of Then Like the Blind Man, Orbie eventually realizes that his grandparents are great people who love him. They may not have attained a high level of school education, but they are wise about farm life and human nature.

They don't like it that their daughter, Ruby, has developed a prejudice for blacks, nor that she's passed it on to Orbie. That's one of the many nice touches I liked about Freddie Owen's debut novel, that in it, it's not Orbie's grandparents who live in Kentucky that exhibit a prejudiced point of view, but it's learned from experiences Orbie and his family have living in Detroit, in the north. Of course, in reality, unfortunately you can find prejudice in every state to this day; but, the author didn't go the stereotypical route of having his northern characters expressing an enlightened POV, and his southern ones being all racists.

Owens, a published poet, has infused Then Like the Blind Man with a poetic sensibility that makes his story and characters come to life for the reader. Through Owens, and Orbie's story, we feel the emotions of being dumped off somewhere he doesn't want to live, at his grandparents' house; but, we come to see them as positive, nurturing influences on Orbie's life. Though Orbie despises the alcoholic Victor, and how his mother has made wrong decisions (to his POV, anyway), Victor is not portrayed as being completely bad. He does show an interest in Orbie at times, like when Orbie expresses his fascination with a scar Victor has on his neck that he got in WWII.

Orbie comes to think that Victor acts nicely towards him only further to ingratiate himself with Ruby, Orbie's mother. Ruby is the type of woman who thinks she can change the man she loves, to rehabilitate him, and she always holds out a spark of hope for Victor. This is an aspect about her that kind of frustrated me as a reader, and made me want to tell her-if she was real and in front of me-to stop deluding herself and wake up and realize what a jerk Victor is most of the time. But, thinking of a man who has faults as being some sort of "project," or someone who can be "rehabilitated," is a trait that some women have, so Ruby's having this trait brought even more realism to the story.

Besides there being various themes and messages in Then Like the Blind Man, Orbie's boyhood exuberance, how he relates to his grandparents, his changing point of view about much of what he'd taken for granted; and his adventures are what really makes the novel captivating. Freddie Owens fills the pages of his novel with other very memorable characters, like the humpbacked elderly lady, Bird; Moses Mashbone; Mrs. Profit; and Nealy Harlan. If you're a fan of novels like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, Freddie Owens's Then Like the Blind Man is s Must Read!

Books on Short Stories: Enjoy Brevity and Variety

By Anuradha Malhotra

In the words of Edgar Allan Poe: "A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must be build towards it."

What kind of books on short stories available on portals?

Why such books are so popular

Brevity Saves Time: When you do not have time for reading a voluminous thing with countless pages, attempting a quickie such as a short tale is a good option. Reading stories that are spread to just a few pages of a book makes them immensely popular among book-enthusiasts. You don't have to sit for hours wait for the last page to know how it ends; on the other hand, a single long plot that may just drag and drag, and put your patience to test. A book on short stories, can be finished in a day or two, or even hours.
Variety Makes Them Interesting: Such books reflect different moods and styles; this makes them interesting to read. Readers always get turn on by variety as presented by a bunch of stories put together.
Kill Free Time: Reading them is a perfect way of spending the free hours that you have at your hand. Order these books online and the same shall delivered right at your doorstep.

Recommended Books:

The Best American Short Stories 2011 (By: Geraldine Brooks and Heidi Pitlor)
PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011: The Best Stories of the Year (By: Laura Furman)
A Treasure Trove of Short Stories Workbook: A Collection of Short Stories (By: S. Chakravarthi, R.S. Gupta)
The Cabulliwalah and other Stories (By: R.N. Tagore)
Gotta Have It: 60 Stories of Sudden Sex (By: Rachel Kramer Bussel)

The Great Value Of Books - Training Your Children To Read

By Neriza N Neville

One of the most important things you will be able to do, as a parent, is equip your children for their future - but as much as most parents are aware of this, not every parent has a clear understanding of exactly what this means; of course, there are a lot of things that will go into "equipping your children for their future," but one of the best ways to go about making sure your children are in the best position possible to succeed in life is to teach them to read from an early age, and there are a number of reasons why.

For one thing, you are going to want to realize that the brain needs to be exercised in order for it to operate at its maximum potential, and this goes for children just as much as it goes for adults; when you let your children sit around and play video games and watch television from an early age, they will be failing to make the important connections that will help their brain develop - but when you instead get your children reading and using their minds, they will develop mentally at a much quicker pace.

For another thing, you will discover that reading opens up your child's creative thinking to a much higher level - and when you closely examine the problems and obstacles you encounter every week (and even every day) in adult life, you will realize just how valuable it will be to have a developed sense of creativity; after all, it is often those who are most creative who manage to overcome the obstacles they face in everyday life, as they are able to come up with creative solutions to help them get by!

And finally - even beyond all the great ways in which reading is going to help your child develop mentally and creatively - teaching your child how to read from an early age will give the two of you something over which you can bond, something the two of you can share with one another, and through which the two of you can create joint memories; and when it comes down to it, there is very little you can do as a parent that will be more valuable than creating shared memories with your child.

As a parent, one of your responsibilities will be doing everything you can to equip your child to lead the best life they can possibly lead - and one of the best ways to do this is to simply help your child learn how to read from an early age; if you are wanting to help your child in this area, be sure to visit us at http://www.myfavoritekidstories.com/ - and start helping your child grow into the person you are hoping for them to be!

~Neriza Neville
Find the best bedtime stories!
http://www.myfavoritekidstories.com/