Blogs

Story and Poem of the Month

Our Story and Poem of the Month for May has very kindly been chosen by Di_Hard: All the gifted writers who posted their wonderful work this month have made choosing only one Story and Poem very difficult, but a great time reading! I would like to recommend all of Mark Burrow's intensely moving Breakdowns, in May particularly : https://www.abctales.com/story/mark-burrow/breakdowns-7-part-i And a writer new to ABCTales, Aronovitz has started...

Great Scottish Writers, George Mackay Brown (2019 [1987]) The Golden Bird. Two Orkney Stories.

George Mackay Brown writes about what he knows. An Orkney life. His characters are crofters, grounded in the shallow soil and windblown sea, their surnames a mark of where they bide. One bleeds into the other in a communal life in which Mackay Brown is poetically versed. The opening lines of The Golden Bird show this by documenting an island feud. ‘They had not spoken to each other, the crofts of Gorse and Feaquoy, for three generations. And...

Story & Poem of the Week, & Inspiration Point 2nd June 2023

Chosen this week by Ewan . Hello all, another bank holiday week, but that hasn't stopped you gifted writers one bit. Naturally, that makes it all a bit difficult, and in the end whatever someone picks, it's all as subjective as subjective can be. Anyway, Poem of the Week is onemorething's 'Mother Dies' and very nice to see something from one of our best poets again. Honourable mentions go to Simon Barget's Elk and Marandina's Ranthambore , which...

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

Thank you so much for all the wonderful stories and poems you've posted this week. A very strong week for poetry, and almost impossible to decide, but in the end I've gone with Di_Hard's beautiful inklings. Extremely honourable mentions go to Rhiannonw for On the 6500+ km journey, twice and Angusfolklore's For The Birds Our Story of the Week is jxmartin's Magic in a marble Read them all and you won't regret it! https://www.abctales.com/story/...

Damon Galgut (2021) The Promise.

The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize. The premise is simple, but it got muddled up in my mind. Ma (Rachel Swart) has terminal cancer. She makes Pa (Herman Albertus Swart, known as Mannie) promise that he’ll leave the house and title deeds to the woman that has nursed her and helped bring up her children, Salome. But the hired help, or servant, is black. She lives with her son, Lukas, on what is termed The Lombard Place. A farm worker’s home...

Revelation: Love and Death by David Lott (Animan). Available NOW!

I am very pleased to announce the publication of Revelation: love and death, a poetry collection by David Lott who writes on ABCTales as Animan: Varied and lucid, the poems in this series depict a history, a journey. They begin with a portrayal of innocence, marked by a desire to please others and by a limited ability to understand and evaluate experience. Then, in part 2, they present moments of essentials and permanents, to serve as a...

In Search of Bible John, Fred Dineage’s Murder Casebook, STV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_John Between 22 February 1968 – 31 October 1969, three Glasgow women that attended the dancing at the Barrowland Ballroom never made it home. Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock were raped and murdered. We’ve become attuned to the nuances of serial killers through thousands of stories, books programmes and podcasts. This is the shortened version, originally shown in September 2011. David Hayman...

Thirteen Lives (2022) Amazon, screenplay by William Nicholson, and directed by Ron Howard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Lives https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thirteen-Lives-Viggo-Mortensen/dp/B09ZSJ8QN4/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1L041PIUBBOXF&keywords=thirteen&qid=1684779761&s=instant-video&sprefix=thirteen%2Cinstant-video%2C93&sr=1-2 Like me, you may vaguely remember this, 23rd June 2018. 12 boys from Thailand (and their soccer coach) = 13, trapped in an underground cave (Tham Luang) and being rescued. We know there is a...

Agnes Owens (2009) The Complete Novellas.

I hadn’t heard of the not too lauded Scottish novelist Agnes Ownes, from Balloch. She was born in 1926, and most of her longer, short stories—novellas—were published in the 1980s. Five of them have been brought together. Like Birds in the Wilderness, A Working Mother, For the Love of Willie, Bad Attitudes and Jen’s Party . What they have in common is stories mirror a working-class view of the world. Dialect isn’t dialect. Just the way people...

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