Author Description

An interesting collection for anyone who loves stories.<br/>Whether they are autobiographical or fictional, the 16 short stories in this collection, written by thirteen writers from ten different countries, are a delight to the reader's imagination — and for a while, even in these Covid times, they will help soothing our inner discomfort.<br/>A few passages from the stories:<br/><br/>— And then she gasped and felt the onset of a blush as he suddenly stood in front of her. His fingers trailed her stem, lightly touching her brittle twigs. ‘A lovely Maple’, he murmured.<br/>(A.Potgieter, 'Touched by a Gardener')<br/><br/>— He walked the land. He talked to people. He summoned all his interpersonal skills. Subtlety, he thought, was his forte. And when he did try to test the people, he discovered they had little time for his advances. Why would the common person want to discover the meaning of the real?<br/>(M.Lemon, 'Donnie's Magic Snake')<br/><br/>— She stares at the slow drift of clouds high above in the azure sky. Birds were singing in a distant chorus and the cows were lazily mooing. Yeah, Houkes Hill was Paulie’s secret, quiet place.<br/>(M.Reninger, 'Exploration')<br/><br/>— The angelic usher rose to his feet, lifted his staff of office, shook the cobwebs from his feathers and murmured; "Silence in court!"<br/>(M.Gill, 'Lazarus ‒ A Fable')<br/><br/>— I continued to have a strong interest in painting. Only in the painting class did I laugh; I saved the other class times for thinking. What puzzled Teacher Huang was that Old Hen was always in my paintings. I drew hens easily, in various poses, but not roosters.<br/>(T.Tsai, 'Angel Hen')<br/><br/>— Who of us actually exists? And why do we usually meet accidentally on an unknown street in a lonely crowd of skeletons without a ghost? We get lost in ourselves, in semantic transparency of our gaze.<br/>(A.Banasiak, 'Plusminus')<br/><br/>— That picture brought Dave a Photography award and the invitation to study photography