Seventeen Stories/Selected Stories

Limited edition hardbacks are a delight for the connoisseur and collector and an adornment to the bookshelves, but have you ever also hankered for a book that you can just bung in your valise, rucksack or beach bag? The battered dog-eared wind-torn rain-spattered sand-encrusted companion of your adventures?

If so, your hankering is now answered with the publication by The Swan River Press of paperback editions of Seventeen Stories (2013) and Selected Stories (2012).

Now you can if you wish read ‘The Axholme Toll’ while exploring the legendary inland island itself, or visit fenland Ely as you thrill to ‘The Fall of the King of Babylon’.

Or perhaps you may, when the times permit, want to contemplate strange heresies while in ‘A Walled Garden on the Bosphoros’; or in Prague, City of Magic, see if you can find ‘The Bookshop in Novy Svet’. 

If so, these handy and inexpensive editions will fit lightly in your luggage while losing nothing of their inner lustre.

Of course, you may also need one at home so that you don’t have to handle the rare and precious original volume but can still enjoy the stories in these practical paperbacks while eating a buttered crumpet, sipping your favourite Sikkim tea, or powdering your fingertips with rose-scented Turkish Delight. Now you can smear the pages with impunity. 

The Swan River Press have also just published paperback editions of Stephen J Clark’s excellent volume of occult novellas, The Satyr (featuring Austin Osman Spare), and Robert Lloyd Parry’s warmly-received Jamesian anthology Ghosts of the Chit-Chat.

Paperback editions of some of my other story and essay collections are also available from Tartarus Press and Zagava Books.

(Mark Valentine)