Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester and relocated to America during her adolescence following the death of her father, swiftly became the breadwinner for her family by crafting fiction for popular magazines. Hodgson demonstrated a talent for transforming clichés about England into captivating narratives tailored for the American mass-market: though she initially focused on creating […]
20 minutes between submitting a query to a prospect agent and receiving a form rejection is close to my previous record, so let’s celebrate with a feast of Gothic tales on my Patreon, shall we? Born in 1849 in Scotland, James Hume Nisbet is known for his horror stories mostly set in Australia, a place […]
Frederick George Loring was an English naval officer born in 1869, an early expert in the pioneering technology of wireless telegraphy and, incidentally, a writer. Born in the Isle of Wight as the eldest son of Admiral Sir William Loring and Frances Louisa Adams, he followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and served as […]
Easter-time rejection! Who sends a refusal on Easter morning? One of the agents I queried, apparently. This means my Patrons receive another one of my favourite novels, digitised by yours truly: The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle. It might seem strange to include this book in a selection that has been mostly dealing with […]
Easter/time rejection! While I have two agents looking at the full manuscript, yet another one answered “thanks but no thanks”, so my Patrons get their festive story featuring spring, bunnies and butterflies. Well, no, not really. Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875) was a prominent Russian intellectual who worked as poet, novelist, playwright, and diplomat. He ventured […]
New rejection, new book on Patreon! Florence Marryat (1833-1899) was a British author and actress, and perhaps one of the most underrated figures in the Victorian era. Born the daughter of famed naval captain and novelist Frederick Marryat, Florence’s life was marked by both privilege and upheaval. Her parents separated when she was young, and […]
I was finally able to present my Patrons with a digitised, free version of one of the most underrated and yet more significant works by Jules Verne: The Castle of the Carpathians. Published five years before Bram Stoker consigned Transylvania to the public’s imagination as a land of undead creatures, Verne wrote this science fiction […]
Last week I got another rejection and I wanted to give my Patrons one of the classical Gothic books I’m annotating but it isn’t ready yet, so we’ll settle for another bunch of folktales collected by Grazia Deledda and translated by yours truly. Whom, as we’ve established on threads, is Gothic enough. The first tale, […]
I received another rejection from a prospect agent, and I have another tale for you. It’s an original translation from one of the folktales collected by Grazia Deledda, and this time is free for everybody. You can read it here or on the Patreon. Enjoy! The Castle of Galtellì One night last December I spent […]
Tuonetar is the Queen of the Underworld in Finnish mythology, and I promised you we’d talk about her when we saw her daughter Kalma, who’s tasked to prevent the dead from escaping their tombs. She brews one kick-ass beer, and she’s today’s profile on my Patreon.