Featured title: 'Night Flight from Marabar' by K. Overman-Edmiston

This collection of short stories by Western Australian author, K. Overman-Edmiston, takes the reader on a journey through continents and cultures.

The stories present a variety of characters. We meet a young man cleaning up after a rock concert; a beekeeper of the present with an ancient past; a women seeking release from a deadening marriage; an old, dying man eking out a quiet space for pleasure and peace; a tired family man re-living the intensity of a teenage crush; and two women lost, but regained through unconditional friendship.

Whether set in Australia, France, Ireland or Greece, the stories present situations rich in colour and texture. Most of all, however, they illustrate the complexity of the inner human landscape.

These are stories of the human spirit. They are explorations of how people cope. They look to the mystical as being firmly grounded in the day-to-day. This collection evokes the poetry of everyday life.

Story titles

The Beekeeper 33 Heavens

Exile, 1946 Sculptures in Air

At the Bus-Stop Billow

To the Skelligs Nocturne

Crush Love Song

Lament Urban Myth

Gone Fishing Setting the Compass

The Land, the Crow,

the Wind

READ A REVIEW OF NIGHT FLIGHT from MARABAR!

Ben Zipper in the Australian Book Review of September 1999 [No. 214] wrote the following:

"As her first anthology of short fiction, Karen Overman-Edmiston's work emerges with a strong coherence and singularity of tone. There are definite tendencies towards magic realism ... and dramatic irony, but these arise without brash overstatement. Instead, the surreal in these quiet stories develops through the real, exemplifying an understated authorial intelligence. In 'Exile, 1946' a first-person Albert Einstein returns to Germany after the war to find his home inhabited by a study group consisting of Schiller, Goethe, Coleridge, a bearded Queen Elizabeth and another man who swears he is Einstein.

Having travelled widely, Overman-Edmiston uses location to wise advantage, as a tool of explaining and exploring human experience. From a beekeeper in Greece with an ancient secret to a young woman in Australia with a yearning to become a star (perhaps literally), geographical locations both repel and compel characters - as if the charts of human inner longing can (in part at least) be mapped out on the earth's terrain. The tone of the stories remains mostly on the small, focused detail, allowing the reader to fuse the parts into their own subjective whole. This collection clearly shows literary promise of more to come."

The stories below are also available as free ebooks. Follow the links to Smashwords to download:

The Beekeeper - http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13316

Exile, 1946 - http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/32193

The Land, the Crow, the Wind - http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/35593