Tuesday 12 October 2010

A new book!

Not a new episode I'm afraid - but I can announce a new project from Radio Tilling; a new book!
Some time ago, I found a 'lost' short story by E.F.Benson entitled "The Renewal" - I checked with a number of experts in the field, and consulted my personal collection (as well as those online) and could not find it included in any of the many and various collections that have appeared in the years since Fred died.
The story originally appeared in The Cosmopolitan Magazine in November 1894 and I found it purely by chance during one of my occasional searches on eBay for Benson material.
Benson is now (in the UK at least, and quite probably elsewhere as well) out of copyright, it being 70 years since his death in 1940, and so I thought it the perfect time to make the story available in printed form once more.  To make the book (more a booklet to be honest) more interesting, I have also included another story that I found on eBay, though subsequent research reveals it to have been included in a small press Benson collection some years ago - a collection that is, as far as I am aware, no longer in print.  This story, also from 1894, is entitled "The Return of The Probationer" and originally appeared in the July 1894 issue of The English Illustrated Magazine.
Both stories, along with the original illustrations and copies of the respective magazine covers and a copy of the rejection letter sent by the editor of The Windsor Magazine (as featured in the introduction to Jack Adrian's excellent volume of Fred's ghost stories "Collected Spook Stories Vol 4 - The Face" published by Ash Tree Press in 2003), have been collected into a single 46 page booklet (along with one of my own original stories, set in Tilling and entitled "A Locket Full of Woe" - it's a slightly revised version of the story I have on my personal website) and is now available on the EFBenson.co.uk Cafe Press store priced at US$8 or £6 (plus postage and packaging)

Please do consider making a purchase - profits go towards keeping the EFBenson.co.uk website and the Radio Tilling podcast going in these somewhat difficult times.