Night-time Stories E-Book

• Herausgeber: The Emma Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The Emma Press Prose Pamphlets
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 55

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A child waits for the tooth fairy; a mother spends a night watching a recording of the previous night; two women face the ghosts that haunted their grandmothers. The nights in these ten stories are thick and substantial, ambiguous and alluring. Eerie, magical, hushed and surprisingly alive, this anthology shows the night as a place where connections are made and daylit lives can be changed.

Leseprobe

NIGHT-TIMESTORIES

OTHERTITLESFROMTHEEMMAPRESS

SHORTSTORIESANDESSAYS

Hailman, by Leanne Radojkovich

Postcard Stories 2, by Jan Carson

Tiny Moons, by Nina Mingya Powles

Once Upon A Time In Birmingham, by Louise Palfreyman

The Secret Box, by Daina Tabūna, tr. from Latvian by Jayde Will

POETRYCOLLECTIONS

Europe, Love Me Back, by Rakhshan Rizwan

POETRYANDARTSQUARES

Menagerie, by Cheryl Pearson, illus. by Amy Louise Evans

One day at the Taiwan Land Bank Dinosaur Museum, by Elīna Eihmane

Pilgrim, by Lisabelle Tay, illus. by Reena Makwana

The Fox's Wedding, by Rebecca Hurst, illus. by Reena Makwana

POETRYPAMPHLETS

The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising, by Jack Houston

The Bell Tower, by Pamela Crowe

Ovarium, by Joanna Ingham

Milk Snake, by Toby Buckley

BOOKSFORCHILDREN

Poems the wind blew in, by Karmelo C Iribarren, tr. from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel

My Sneezes Are Perfect, by Rakhshan Rizwan

The Bee Is Not Afraid of Me: A Book of Insect Poems, edited by Fran Long and Isabel Galleymore

Cloud Soup, by Kate Wakeling

THEEMMAPRESS

First published in the UK in 2022 by The Emma Press Ltd.

Stories © individual writers 2022

Selection and introduction © Yen-Yen Lu 2022

All rights reserved.

The rights of Yen-Yen Lu to be identified as the editor of this anthology and the writers to be identified as the authors of their stories have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-912915-60-6

EPUBISBN978-1-912915-61-3

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the UK

by TJ Books, Padstow.

The Emma Press

theemmapress.com

[email protected]

Birmingham, UK

Introduction from the editor

Once, when I was fourteen, I stayed up for an entire night. It wasn’t planned and I didn’t do anything or go anywhere particularly exciting: I sat on my bedroom floor, I read, I listened to the radio. All things I might do in the daytime, but there was something thrilling about doing them at night.

I’ve since experienced many nights that were objectively more eventful and exciting, a few involving ghosts and/or alcohol, but I always come back to this night. The quiet electricity in the air as I sat with my book. My hope as I began editing this anthology was to find stories that capture the strangeness and subtle magic that I experienced that night, that I’ve experienced since, and that many others share, judging by the number of submissions we received for the theme.

It was also important for me to choose a universal theme for The Emma Press’ first short story anthology, as I hoped to encourage a greater range of writers to submit their work and explore what a night-time story meant to them. As a result, this anthology encapsulates a spectrum of night-time stories, from intense and surreal to wonderfully mundane.

There is some literal magic and fantasy in these stories, which I expected and looked forward to while reading submissions. A beautiful example features in John Kitchen’s ‘dream lovers’, where acquaintances develop a closer and more intimate relationship through shared dreams. And in ‘Kikimora’ by Sofija Ana Zovko, a woman learns that a mischievous creature she believed to be a figment of her late grandmother’s imagination comes to life at night. These stories reminded me of how, sometimes, the mystical connections that you might be sceptical about during the day can seem much more believable after dark.

Other stories explore more everyday activities and find magic in the mundane. A quiet supermarket trip in ‘Even This Helps’ by Zoë Wells magnifies even the smallest moments into something more mysterious than they really are. A similar concept runs through ‘Sleeping in Shifts’ by Winifred Mok, where filmmakers living in close quarters observe the differences in working a day shift and a night shift, as well as the differences between a ‘day person’ and a ‘night person’. Parts of these stories resonated with me and made me think again of staying up all night when I was a teenager, noticing how eerie and quiet the world seemed.

Many of the stories in the anthology explore the idea that, in contrast to a fast-paced daytime atmosphere, the night is a time to slow down and reflect, but it’s necessary to have both light and dark to appreciate the other. This feels particularly important in a year of so much uncertainty – at the same time, while plans are put on hold, many are finding an opportunity to slow down and pay attention to quieter, more peaceful moments.

It was a joy to put this anthology together and to have collected stories that, although they share a similar theme, draw on unique cultures and customs from all over the world, from across the UK to New Zealand to Poland. I hope that readers might find something familiar in this anthology and enjoy reading them as much as I did.

Yen-Yen Lu, November 2020

CONTENTS

Introduction from the editor

The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles Now, by Angela Readman

Sleeping in Shifts, by Winifred Mok

Whose Lounge? by Leanne Radojkovich

Obon, by Miyuki Tatsuma

Dream Boats, by Jane Roberts

(hippocampus paradoxus), by Valentine Carter

Daylight Saving Time, by Rebecca Rouillard

Kikimora, by Sofija Ana Zovko

dream lovers, by John Kitchen

Even This Helps, by Zoë Wells

About the writers

About the editor

About The Emma Press

The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles Now

Angela Readman

Lately, I look out of the window at night and always see some girl just like me looking out in her pyjamas, fingers pressed to her cheek. The streets glow with night-lights; none of us can sleep. It’s been like this since Jonah claimed he caught the tooth fairy.

He was sucking a gobstopper when he told me, the kind with as many layers as a planet. Every so often he spat it onto his palm to see if it had changed colour, like a mood ring of his big fat mouth.

‘You want a lick?’ he asked. The gobstopper was purple, except around his fingers where it was red. I shook my head and pushed a loose canine back and forth with my tongue. It was taking so long to come out I’d developed a mannerism of pushing my tongue to the side of my face constantly.

‘You won’t get anything, you know, when that tooth falls out. There’s no fairy. Not anymore.’