“If we want to write, it makes sense to read—and to read like a writer. If we wanted to grow roses, we would want to visit rose gardens and try to see them the way that a rose gardener would.”
“There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.”
“The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.”
Francine Prose (born 1947) is an American author of twenty-one works of fiction, including the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932and Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. She is Visiting Professor of Literature at Bard College, and formerly president of PEN. Prose is well known for her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. Her newest book is a collection of essays, What to Read and Why.
“Francine Prose is a keen observer, and her fiction is full of wryly delivered truths and sardonic witticisms that come from paying close attention to the world.” —The Atlantic
“Francine Prose has a knack for getting to the heart of human nature.” —USA Today
Please join me in my reading nook and discover an author every week at Reading Fiction Blog! And browse the Index of Authors’ Tales above to find over 200 free short stories by over 100 famous authors.
Once a month I feature a FREE short story by contemporary and classic authors.
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
“We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.”
Anaïs Nin (1903 — 1977) was a French-Cuban author and 20th century diarist, based in France and later in the United States. She began what became her life-long work of art in 1914 at the age of eleven and kept writing until her death 63 years later in 1977. The novelist and short story writer gained international fame with her journals. She is well-known for her relationship with Henry Miller, and his wife, June. Much of her work, including Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published after she died. Nin believed that consciousness is a stream of images and words that flow from us as long as we live, and something to be shared.
The Wisdom of Anais Nin: 5 minutes!
Why I Write by Anais Nin (2 minutes):
Readers, many of you know that I have as special place in my heart for dead authors. Anais Nin is very dear to me because Nin is a part of my novel Greylock in the character of Lia Marrs. I spent weeks researching Nin’s life, her art, and her feminine brio that dramatizes the complexity of women. As a bonus, you can read her short story The Houseboathere at Reading Fiction Blog:
Please join me in my reading nook and discover an author every week at Reading Fiction Blog! Browse the Index of Authors’ Tales above to find over 200 free short stories by over 100 famous authors.
“Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.”
“It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses.”
Colette (1873 – 1954) was the pen name for Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. French writer of the first half of the 20th century whose best novels, largely concerned with the pains and pleasures. Her greatest strength as a writer is her sensory evocation of sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and colors. She is known for her novel Gigi (1944), the story of a girl reared by two elderly sisters to become a courtesan, was adapted for both stage and screen. She wrote the influential Claudine books. The novel Cheriis considered to be her masterpiece. Her first husband, the nefarious Willy (Henry Gauthier-Villars), took the credit for her novels and the earnings. From 1949 she was increasingly crippled by arthritis. She ended her days, a legendary figure surrounded by her beloved cats, confined to her beautiful Palais-Royal apartment overlooking Paris.
Read more about this author at The Guardian: ‘She wrote novels, short stories, essays, memoirs and as a journalist reported on everything from domestic violence to the front lines of the first world war, from anorexia to literature, from fashion and cooking to fake orgasms.’
Join me in my reading nook and discover an author every week at Reading Fiction Blog! And browse the Index of Authors’ Tales above to find over 200 free short stories by over 100 famous authors.
Once a month I feature a FREE short story by contemporary and classic authors.
“Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.”
—Anaïs Nin
Today, February 21, is the anniversary birth date of the legendary and visionary writer Anaïs Nin.
I became acquainted with Anaïs Nin’s work many years ago when I read her fiction, essays, and her inspiring diaries. While I researched and wrote my novel Greylock, Anaïs Nin made sudden appearances in one of my characters Lia Marrs. The above quote refers to what happens in Greylock, not only to Lia Marrs, but to the main character Alexei Georg—in a metaphysical sense. Anaïs Nin became a thread in the novel as I developed my metaphysical mystery.
Because I’ve always been fascinated by the mind, writings, and creativity of Anaïs Nin, I am proud and happy to celebrate Anaïs’s 114th birthday anniversary , February 21st, and bring you this great writer and her fiction. She’s been accused by the elite of society of narcissism and sexual perversion; she’s been highly praised by her readership for her skills, bravery, and ruthlessly honest writings. What began as a failed writing career, nearly homeless and broke, she soared to success as a feminist icon in the 1960s with Spy In The House of Love and her 7 volumes of diaries published by Harcourt Brace. She died at the height of her fame in 1977. Her short story The Houseboat is considered a short story about her “voyage within.”
The Houseboat by Anaïs Nin (1930s)
Tuesday’s Tale of Terror February 21, 2017
This story is more like a memoir, a reminiscence, about people existing outside of normal life: the dispossessed. Those who have “walked and slept in counter-rhythm to the world.”
Our narrator is living in this beat up houseboat on the Seine in France. She is alone with her books, her diaries, her family photos, and her soul.
“Once inside the houseboat, all the voyages began. Even at night with its shutters closed, no smoke coming out of its chimney, asleep and secret, it had an air of mysteriously sailing somewhere … On the table lay a revolver. No harm could come to me on the water but someone had laid a revolver there believing I might need it. “
“But I was so averse to killing that even shooting into the water I felt uneasy, as if I might kill the Unknown Woman of the Seine again—the woman who had drowned herself here years ago and who was so beautiful that at the Morgue they had taken a plaster cast of her face.”
This prose is quintessential Nin—eloquent, deep, and a labyrinth into the mind. The haunting images will leave you wanting more of this author.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was born in Paris. She wrote The House of Incest, a prose-poem (1936), The Winter of Artifice (1939), and short stories collected in Under a Glass Bell (1944). Most of her diaries were published and are still popular today. Her most commercially successful books were her erotica published as Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979).
“Before Lena Dunham, there was Anaïs Nin – now patron saint of social media,” Read more at
And at Brain Pickings “Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us.”
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Don’t forget to view the INDEX above of more free Tales of Terror. This is a compendium of 200 short stories by over 100 master storytellers of mystery, supernatural, ghost stories, crime, and horror. Join me in reading one short story every other week!
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (1955)
Tuesday’s Tale of Terror February 14, 2017
Dark fiction is known to be a broad category, but most agree it is the literary expressions of disturbing human nature. The stories are sometimes graphically violent. This story is not–it does have a dark truth and a riveting suspense.
Genius.com
We are in the 1950s. Grandma and her family are on a road trip from Georgia to Florida. Grandma’s son, Bailey, his ‘cabbage-faced wife,’ and their children—a bratty girl and boy—and a cat named Pitty Sing are headed through the deep South. Family dynamics here are intense as you might expect on a long car trip.
Bailey, the dad: “All right!” he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side of the road. “Will you all shut up? Will you all just shut up for one second? If you don’t shut up, we won’t go anywhere.”
And then an accident happens. That silly snarly cat. They tumbled into a ditch. And as it happens, an escaped convict, a killer named “The Misfit” is on the loose in the deep South.
“Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a few minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly as if the occupants were watching them. The grandmother stood up and waved both arms dramatically to attract their attention. The car continued to come on slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared again, moving even slower, on top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black battered hearse-like automobile. There were three men in it.”
The story isn’t horror but it will horrify the reader. Tightly crafted, it’s a superb tale of literal and figurative turning points. What struck me was the presence of the bird ghost, “bright blue parrots” threaded in. Chilling effect.
This is bizarre Southern literature by an awe-inspiring writer, a master of form, Flannery O’Connor. She was an American fiction author and essayist, wrote novels and thirty-two short stories, and won a National Book Award and three O. Henry Awards. The famous Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction just celebrated its 30th anniversary at The University of Georgia Press. The award was established to encourage gifted young writers by bringing their work to the attention of readers and reviewers.
“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place
and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.” Flannery O’Connor
O’Connor loved birds. As a child, she sewed clothes for her pet chickens. Peacocks were her favorite. She kept near 40 peacocks on her property. Visit her website: http://www.flanneryoconnor.org/
Read A Good Man is Hard to Find (Finalist for the 1956 National Book Award in Fiction ) at Xroads.Virginia.Edu.
Listen and read along to the story (read by Flannery O’Connor) at Genius.com.
Don’t forget to view the INDEX above of more free Tales of Terror. This is a compendium of nearly 200 short stories by over 100 master storytellers of mystery, supernatural, ghost stories, and horror. Join me in reading one short story every other week! Comments are welcome.
Would you like to participate in celebrating women authors in the horror genre?
There is quite a lot of information that women are under-represented in this genre and have been for a long time. Julie Crisp at TOR-UK has reported (Sexism in Genre Publishing) that of the 503 submissions for last year only 17% were manuscripts from women authors. So, it’s clear that women writers have got to get their boots on the ground and start flooding the markets with submissions if we are going to increase our presence. And in a recent review by Cinriter this year, the percent of women authors published in small presses is at 9% (Women in the Horror Small Press).
So, having a month devoted to recognizing women authors in horror is really important for our visibility. We are encouraging readers to spend some time this month reading, purchasing, supporting women authors wherever you can. And let’s start here, today, at Reading Fiction, Tales of Terror.
I have a guest blog at HorrorSociety.com Dead Authors Can Still Thrill Readers. If you are following this blog and like to read classic horror stories, you’ll find my blog post at Horror Society to be very helpful in discovering lots of classic women writers in horror. And, this month all my posts here will be women authors.
There are plenty of sites celebrating women horror writers in February, so please stop by these sites, enjoy, make comments, and if you are of the mind, explore a new author. We make our living selling our stories and novels and hope that this month of all months, readers will recognize and appreciate our creativity with comments, reviews, support, and book and short story purchases.
Thank you to everyone who is following my blog here and those who have bookmarked it and stop in regularly. And special thanks to those who have read my short stories and made comments and emails, and to those who have purchased my novels The Dazzling Darkness and Night Sea Journey, A Tale of the Supernatural (soon to be released in soft cover by Crispin Books). Every single sale is ever so meaningful!
The Little Maid at the Door by Mary Wilkins Freeman (1892) Women In Horror
Tuesday’s Tale of Terror October 22, 2013
Witches’ winds are blowing in Salem. Listen to their haughty chants; watch for their spells and conjures. We love bewitching stories at this time of year, don’t we? Reading is such a seduction with atmospherics, mysterious characters we can’t resist, or a plot that thickens at every moment so we have to keep turning the pages. In the story I give you today, The Little Maid at the Door, the prose hits tenderly. The little maid at the door elicits a deep power in the heart. Mary Wilkins Freeman writes a historical fiction of family life, of witches in Salem, and the “disease of the mind” when partridges or squirrels might be demons in disguise. Not to mention the witches’ “yellow birds.” Freeman was known to write stories of rural domestic life in New England with penetrating supernaturalism. Her prose grabs you with anxious stirring. Read it softly and savor each image because this story is probably one of her best for describing life in Salem when “the leaves came out and the flowers bloomed in vain for the people in and about Salem village.”
“JOSEPH BAYLEY and his wife Ann came riding down from Salem village.”
The two are within a half a mile of the old Proctor house, known to be “full of devils.” As if that weren’t enough, the entire Proctor family was just arrested and jailed for witchcraft. Ann and Joseph, fearful of what evil hides within the woods there, intend to drive their horse fast and furiously down the road passed the Proctor house when they see a cursed glossy black beast. Terrified, Joseph speeds up, but Ann catches another sight … a little maid at the front door of the Proctor house. And here we meet little Abigail Proctor, abandoned child with a corn cob poppet (doll). Is she a witch too, like her mother, father, brother, and sister? With the excuse of dropping her shoe, Ann convinces Joseph to stop their horse so that she may engage the sad child at the door.
[Image from Literary Gothic, Howard Pyle Illustration]
Author Mary Wilkins Freeman had volumes of her short stories and novels published, many stories in the prestigious Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. She was the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her writing had a direct influence on readers because of her themes of rebellions of spinsters and the oppressive confines of 19th-century married life.
Here’s a little bonus for you. Mary Wilkins wrote a play about the Salem witch trials, Giles Cory, Yeoman. What a read this is! Poor Giles is condemned to die crushed between two stones. At Gutenberg.org http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17960/17960-h/17960-h.htm
Are you into listening to radio plays? At ScribblingWomen.org Freeman’s short story Louisa was adapted into a very entertaining radio play about a young woman who resists the pressures of contemporary marriage. Listen to Louisa here: http://www.scribblingwomen.org/mflouisafeature.htm Scroll down on that screen and you’ll find more fiction adapted into radio plays by a number of women writers: Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, and more (and not just horror stories).
Good gosh, I couldn’t stop! This author has so much to offer us. Do drop me a comment if you’ve enjoyed discovering Mary Wilkins Freeman’s fiction.
and Little Birds, was published after she died. Nin believed that consciousness is a stream of images and words that flow from us as long as we live, and something to be shared.
Paula Cappa 