Old Soldiers Never Laugh And Other Stories

The first of longtime military writer Bill Leavey's attempts at civilian humour, the tales in this collection range from family feuds and follies to fantasy and social satire. They span across the great nation of Canada from to the British Columbia coast, from a mental health hospital in Manitoba to a television studio in Kingston to a fishing town in Nova Scotia. All readers should recognize themselves in the pages filled with human and non-human foibles along with the traits and habits of humanity that haunt and help us all.

The Devil’s Laugh and Other Stories is a book of folktales to help you check out your philosophy of life. We all know you don’t believe in “ol Scratch,” and you thought you knew what a sphincter was. You’ve never heard of the Quarry of Suffering, and can’t imagine what it’s like to have the evil eye yourself. Therefore, save this book for emergencies—like the day you need to remember what it was like to discover the joy of reading. H. Alan Tansson has also written Captions to the Cartoons We Live: Vol. I—We Think We Think (2010), and Vol. 2—Antidisestablishmentarianistically Speaking (2010). He earns his keep with a variety of jobs in corporate America and is occasionally retired.

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.