I'm going to take you to two very different places for this week's picks. Story of the Week goes to TJW's Point Blank Period which charts his trip fleeing a hurricane in Florida, and our Poem of the Week is Tail-end, where you can join Parson Thru in a summer evening's thunderstorm in Madrid. Both great pieces which I hope you will enjoy as much as I did! https://www.abctales.com/story/tjw/point-blank-period https://www.abctales.com/story/parson...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08xdh9r/the-betrayed-girls Ironically, the lead story BBC Ten O’Clock News which followed this programme was a report calling for the demolition of Haut de la Garenne home in Jersey. Children weren’t listened to. Children were abused. Seventy years of failure: The Jersey Way. Can we demolish Greater Manchester Police? Maggie Oliver one of the few who can hold their head up catalogued their failings from the...

Our Story and Poem for the Month of June, very kindly chosen by Simon Whitworth/Fatboy74: For the story, London Calling's DUP letter is brilliant and I found the Hello Walls by Leroy Mockbee novel opening to be technically great. The story I have gone for is by Ice Rivers called Daddio and Beyond, the part where the toy soldiers are not afraid of death, because they understand they are not alive, but are afraid of being buried and then not found...

I don’t know why people keep giving me books about prisons, gulags and death camps (often the same place) and say things like ‘you’ll like this’. Perhaps it’s because, to nick a quote from the Paul Ferris trial, I’m not fully ‘compos mental’. I’ve had a few drinks sitting in the company of murderers and had pals like Terry Ross who I went to school with and were in and out of prison. A kind of detox from normal society in which he came out...

Poetry Monthly, July Hello all and thanks for your contributions this time to Poetry Monthly! Two interesting poems to go back to: catherine poarch’s Biss or Bissn’t - https://www.abctales.com/story/catherine-poarch/biss-or-bissnt Jennifer Skinner’s Brief Moment to Dream https://www.abctales.com/story/skinnerjennifer/brief-moment-dream The focus for this coming month is – Where I Write. Take this literally – do you write in a garden shed, a...

Posted by airyfairy on Fri, 30 Jun 2017 Two very contrasting Picks for this week! Our Poem of the Week is Rosa Cruz's 'Bluebottle Triptych'. It manages to be beautiful, truly poetic, and almost forensically descriptive, all at the same time. One to be read again and again: https://www.abctales.com/story/rosa-cruz/bluebottle-triptych Story of the Week is MJG's funny, warm-hearted and optimistic 'Condoms for Cornwall'. It will strike a chord with...

Two very contrasting Picks for this week! Our Poem of the Week is Rosa Cruz's 'Bluebottle Triptych'. It manages to be beautiful, truly poetic, and almost forensically descriptive, all at the same time. One to be read again and again: https://www.abctales.com/story/rosa-cruz/bluebottle-triptych Story of the Week is MJG's funny, warm-hearted and optimistic 'Condoms for Cornwall'. It will strike a chord with anyone with memories of their first...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08w9lvb/storyville-tokyo-girls This is creepy and weird. Japan is the kind of insular society that a oriental version of Nigel Farage would approve. In stereotypical fashion the Japanese are polite, but they don’t like foreigners much and tend to stick to their own kind. But they have an aging population and the number of births falls lower every year. Tokyo has one of the highest population densities in the...

This is simple fiction based on a first-person account of what if, running to almost 500 pages. In a way it fits in with other books I’ve been reading, with the idea of the self and better self, living the same life, but making different -moral- choices. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century was at it quoting reams of Balzac and the conundrum if you needed to torture a Chinese person on the other side of the world, to get what you...

I am a huge fan of well-wisher's excellent children's poems and stories, and I didn't realise he'd published some of them until I read this very funny book plug today: https://www.abctales.com/story/well-wisher/sad-poetry-book .. so I thought it deserved a place on the front page for a while. If you have children I can thoroughly recommend the poems!