Renard Press – The Bell Bookshop

Dancing Dan’s Christmas

Emma — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

First published in 1938, Dancing Dan’s Christmas is a witty and evocative tale set in Depression-era New York City.

Several friends come together on Christmas Eve and soothe their souls with some bootleg spirits, and in the cloudy evening that ensues they make someone’s Christmas dream come true.

Part of Renard’s Christmas Card Classics series, proceeds go to Three Peas. This year, instead of a Christmas card, why not send a book?

In the orchard

Emma — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

‘Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree. Her book had fallen into the grass, and her finger still seemed to point? as if she had fallen asleep just there.’First published in 1923 but failing to gain the same fame as her groundbreaking collection Monday or Tuesday, Woolf’s short story In the Orchard is perhaps her most experimental, painting the same picture in three very different ways. Centred on a sleeping Miranda, set in an orchard redolent of her own at Monk’s House, Woolf toys with the powerful style of retelling, leaving the reader to read between the lines.Also included in this edition is ‘Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’, a short essay that, taken with In the Orchard, contextualises the work and firmly relocates the reader to the Bloomsbury Set’s Sussex.

Dracula’s guest

Emma — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Dracula, Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic vampire story, needs no introduction – a perennial on syllabuses and screens alike, generations have been enchanted and enthralled by the Count from Transylvania. But few of Dracula’s fans have heard of Dracula’s Guest, a short story following – it is thought – Jonathan Harker, as he makes his way to Transylvania, and falls prey to Walpurgis Nacht terrors when he stops off in Munich.Unpublished until after Stoker’s death, when it was collected in a volume of short stories by his widow Florence, who revealed that Stoker had intended for it to be the opening section of his great work, Dracula’s Guest is the missing chapter that will captivate all fans of Stoker’s ‘dangers from snow and wolves and night’.