The Wessex Collective: 25 books

Extreme Remedies and Other Stories collects short stories from Helen Hudson's long writing career along with autobiographical pieces that reveal how the concerns in her fiction intertwine with the concerns of her life. The characters in these stories grasp blindly in pursuit of empathy. A retired...

Telling Tales is John Wheatcroft’s latest collection of ten stories that explore the human condition as well as (in the first and last work) the nature of fiction itself. The stories exemply the same qualities that led Jay Neugeboren in a New York Times Book Review to say of an earlier collection, “Mr. Wheatcroft ... gives us tales that are stark and memorable.”

The short stories in Helen Hudson's "Death of a Mother-in-Law" present characters struggling to connect—from a son reckoning with the legacy of his deceased mother, to a woman in a retirement community trying to win over the woman who cleans her room, to a young boy trying to understand the...

Amalie Price—overeducated, sharp-tongued, and slightly cross-eyed—has been coasting along in New York as a sheltered faculty wife who secretly freelances as a French porno translator, when she suddenly finds herself a widow at 40. Left with no financial resources by her activist—and possibly...

This collection of novellas is about journeys. In The Last Long Walk of Noah Brown, a young man leaves his home in Annapolis in 1965. A complete innocent, he trusts the people he encounters along the roads who give him direction until he settles in New Orleans where he eventually rescues people and...

The Two Paths begins at a lakeside cottage where a group of graduating seniors, all of them members of the football team that had won the state championship that year, are having a celebratory end-of-school party. One of them is Robbie Elder, the hero of that game, and it is he who later in the night...

The book is a mixed bag of satire, mordant and/or playful wit as well as other forms of non-realistic fiction. One has an upper class man obsessed with propriety and decorum who gets his comeuppance; one, exploring a major problem with democracy, is in the form of a gothic chiller; another takes the...

Don’t be fooled by the epistolary form of this novel—it is a wonderful and engrossing read. Every letter writer’s voice is unique and distinctive. His divorced second wife Leila’s hilarious couplets are very memorable as is her poison-penned fury at her cheating husband. The fundamentalist...

This exquisite novel tells the story of Prescott Barnes and his family leaving the dust bowl for golden California, but there its similarities with The Grapes of Wrath end. The grandson of a wealthy preacher who disinherited Prescott’s father, Barnes, despite his cynical black humor, unwavering...

In this powerful debut novel, Bob Sommer tells the story of a man who has lived with a secret for most of his life. No one has called Peter Howell by his own name since he belonged to a radical student group in the 1960s. After an act of sabotage that turned deadly, Peter escaped and blended into...

loll v. lolled, lolling, lolls—intr. 1. To move, stand, or recline in an indolent or relaxed manner. 2. To hang or droop laxly. loller n.That’s the dictionary definition. A loller is a shirker, a slacker, a goof-off, an idler, a goldbrick, a dirtball, a ne’er-do-well—all of which define...