Barry Pain

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.

There is something about the number 3. The Ancient Greeks believed 3 was the perfect number, and in China 3 has always been a lucky number, and they know a thing or two.

In this volume our authors explore the terrors of the mind rather than the horrors of reality, although with their pens the difference makes little difference.

The diary is that most intimate of journals, of records. Within its pages the writer records and gives expression to their thoughts, their feelings, their emotional state on all the things that make up and surround them in this world.

In the pens of such luminaries as Henry James, E M Delafield, C E Montague, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and many others we connect with old fashioned media from publishing and advertising to telegrams and radio and everything in between in ways that are surprising, enlightening but always entertaining.

Loss in any form seems to burden us with more weight than anything that can possibly be gained or learnt from. The loss of a person, a loved one, is often overwhelming. It is a subject that authors return to again and again....

Barry Eric Odell Pain was born at 3 Sydney Street in Cambridge, on 28th September 1864. Pain was a master of disturbing prose. A simple premise could in his hands suddenly expand into a world very real but somehow emotionally fraught and on the very edge of darkness as these stories demonstrate....

A pompous and pooterish city clerk with social pretensions relates anecdotes of suburban life in Edwardian England, as he and his patient and long-suffering wife, Eliza, deal with various crises and contretemps....