William Dean Howells

From thirteen Australian writers comes a collection of original speculative fiction short stories that will take you from the great unknown of our own planet, to the stars, and beyond to mystical fantasy worlds. These stories of ‘hope’ include High Tide at Hot Water Beach (Paul Haines), Burned in the Black (Janette Dalgliesh), The Haunted Earth (Sean Williams), Eliot (Benjamin Solah), Boundaries (Karen Lee Field), The Encounter (Sasha Beattie), The God on the Mountain (Graham Storrs), Deployment (Craig Hull), Flowers in the Shadow of the Garden (Joanne Anderton), Blinded (Jodi Cleghorn), The Choosing (Rowena Cory Daniells), Duty and Sacrifice (Alan Baxter) and A Moment, A Day, A Year… (Pamela Freeman). With a preface written by Karen Henderson and the introduction by Simon Haynes, these brilliantly crafted stories, combined with essays donated by Beyondblue and Dr Myfanwy Maple and Mr Warren Bartik, from the University of New England, are accompanied by short snippets of information on suicide. Did you know approximately one million people die by suicide each year worldwide? Suicide happens on a daily basis. It can affect you. Are you suicide aware? Everything in this anthology is donated by Australians to help raise suicide awareness. All profits will be donated to suicide awareness.

Seven stories of abnormal states of consciousness.

Tells the story of a young boy named Pony Baker who, throughout the book, attempts to run away from his home where he lives with his mother, father, and five sisters.

From the book:The Kentons were not rich, but they were certainly richer than the average in the pleasant county town of the Middle West, where they had spent nearly their whole married life. As their circumstances had grown easier, they had mellowed more and more in the keeping of their comfortable home, until they hated to leave it even for the short outings, which their children made them take, to Niagara or the Upper Lakes in the hot weather. They believed that they could not be so well anywhere as in the great square brick house which still kept its four acres about it, in the heart of the growing town, where the trees they had planted with their own hands topped it on three aides, and a spacious garden opened southward behind it to the summer wind. Kenton had his library, where he transacted by day such law business as he had retained in his own hands; but at night he liked to go to his wife's room and sit with her there. They left the parlors and piazzas to their girls, where they could hear them laughing with the young fellows who came to make the morning calls, long since disused in the centres of fashion, or the evening calls, scarcely more authorized by the great world. She sewed, and he read his paper in her satisfactory silence, or they played checkers together. She did not like him to win, and when she found herself unable to bear the prospect of defeat, she refused to let him make the move that threatened the safety of her men. Sometimes he laughed at her, and sometimes he scolded, but they were very good comrades, as elderly married people are apt to be.

255 pages ; 23 cm