Location: United States
Member Since: March 04, 2012

Sign in to subscribe to email alerts for The Wessex Collective

The Wessex Collective

Publisher info

Good fiction does more than tell a story. It gives the gift of experience.

If literary fiction (story telling) is the way that human beings can understand and describe what history feels like, we believe it should be relevant to universal and historic human experience. We believe also that literary fiction provides an opportunity to recognize, with significant impact, the problems of societies as well as individuals. At The Wessex Collective we are publishing books that demonstrate an empathy for human vulnerability and an understanding of how that is important to the larger society.

Where to find The Wessex Collective online

Website: http://www.thewessexcollective.com

Where to buy in print

http://www.thewessexcollective.com

Publisher of

Sort by:
Authors
Newest
Bestsellers
Highest Rated
The Guy in 3C and Other Tales, Satires and Fables by
Price: Free! Words: 23,760. Language: English. Published: November 18, 2014 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
The book is a mixed bag of satire, mordant and/or playful wit as well as other forms of non-realistic fiction. Targets include American historical blindness (The Guy in 3C”) , obsessive social correctness (“A Breach of Decorum”), greed (“The Reminder”) and literary pomposity (Litbiz Magazine Interview)
The Jig of the Union Loller by
Price: Free! Words: 130,370. Language: English. Published: August 18, 2013 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
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 Claude Amognes’s behavior quite nicely. So he’s a good-time Charlie who smokes and drinks too much and does as little work as necessary; but while all these things are true, he’s also a delightful Falstaffian character. He's what makes reading this book such rollicking
The Disappearance of Felix Kulp by
Price: $3.99 USD. Words: 75,060. Language: English. Published: July 25, 2013 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary, Fiction » Themes & motifs » Family sagas
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. From the divorced second wife Leila’s hilarious couplets and poison-penned fury at her cheating husband to the chap selling the pornographic Japanese art, all letters make compelling reading in the mystery of why and how Felix disappears.
Extreme Remedies and Other Stories by
Price: $3.99 USD. Words: 48,830. Language: English. Published: July 24, 2013 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
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 quality that is as vital to the giver as the receiver.
I Am? by
Price: $3.99 USD. Words: 16,860. Language: American English. Published: April 24, 2013 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary, Poetry » Contemporary Poetry
In this intriguing book John Wheatcroft, contemplating a long and brilliant career as a poet, both discusses and demonstrates the many mysteries, experiences and depth of humanity that go into making a poem.
The Trial of Pythagoras & Other Poems by
Price: $4.99 USD. Words: 11,040. Language: English. Published: November 6, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Poetry » Themes & motifs » Nature
A formidable sequence of poems in a variety of poetic styles, which cast an ironic and penetrating eye upon the vision that science, and particularly mathematics, can explain all of the great mysteries of the universe.
The Death of a Mother-in-Law and Other Stories by
Price: $3.99 USD. Words: 37,880. Language: English. Published: October 18, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
The short stories in Helen Hudson's "Death of a Mother-in-Law" present characters struggling to connect — The stories explore strained efforts to bridge racial divides and fraught attempts to find closure in the face of death. Each, whether comedic or dramatic, is enlivened by Hudson's gift for detail and remarkable turn of phrase.
Jonathan Willing's Travels to Pangea by
Price: Free! Words: 80,390. Language: English. Published: July 31, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
A satiric novel about the future that follows Jonathan Willing, a young alien from Tillerland, a place where everyone is treated as family, as he spends a year in Pangea, a place where selfishness is the only moral value and thus the exact antithesis of his homeland. Though often comic in spirit, the book shines a light on where our materialistic society is heading.
Exploring Cassy by
Price: Free! Words: 43,120. Language: English. Published: June 27, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Visionary & metaphysical
What exists after death? Cassy is finding out. She has consciousness, and a form. It’s light and easily moved around. The Counselor for new entrants into Here expects each of them to tell how they left Earth and got Here. With no physical body and no death, existence is indeed different but no less interesting.
Triple Vision by
Price: Free! Words: 41,120. Language: English. Published: May 22, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Triple Vision is the perfect title for this collection. The author sees life through the eyes of a philosopher, a painter, a poet... these stories will challenge you intellectually, stimulate you emotionally and delight all your senses.
The Angry Dust by
Price: $3.99 USD. Words: 85,890. Language: English. Published: March 20, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Prescott Barnes and his family leave the dust bowl for 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, hostility to religion, and his illiteracy, possesses a fierce integrity and passions that make him larger than life at the same time he is perfectly human.
Three Novellas by
Price: Free! Words: 67,430. Language: English. Published: March 20, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
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. The King and the Clockmaker deals with the genesis of evil and the nature of time. In The Vast Darkness, a young woman student of anthropology reflects upon the influence of isolated mountain living upon her neighbors.
The Two Paths by
Price: $3.99 USD. Words: 108,300. Language: English. Published: March 20, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
The Two Paths begins at a lakeside cottage where a group of graduating seniors are having a celebratory end-of-school party. One of them is Robbie Elder, campus football hero, who later in the night violates in an ambiguous rape Cilla Whitten, a plain and socially awkward junior lured there by the promise of excitement and popularity. The rest of the novel follows these two into young adulthood.
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage by
Price: Free! Words: 108,230. Language: English. Published: March 19, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage is a novel about a teenaged girl taken from her alcoholic and promiscuous mother and sent to live with her uncle, a tyrannical fundamentalist minister. The only non-fundamentalist she befriends in high school is Jeremy Lawrence, a boy whose father was killed in a car accident; years later they serendipitously meet again.
On a Darkling Plain by
You set the price! Words: 116,780. Language: English. Published: March 16, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Samuel Jellerson, 56 and forced into early retirement, is walking in the woods behind the family farm in Maine one fall day when he witnesses a priest molesting a boy. From this one event all the action in the novel follows and draws a wide cross section of the town into a theme that explores the nature of evil and its antidote empathy, the force that creates community, and fellow-feeling.
The Many Change and Pass by
Price: Free! Words: 138,830. Language: English. Published: March 15, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
The novel begins with the mercury poisoning of a small, impoverished boy and follows Chris Andrews, a ecological activist, Myron Seavey, a progressive librarian, and a dozen other characters, including the women Chris lives with in a house in Portland and the brother of the poisoned boy, Malcolm Kimball, who drops out of school, as they all deal with the implications of this poisoning.
Brother of Cloud in the Water by
Price: $3.99 USD. Words: 54,800. Language: English. Published: March 14, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Brother of Cloud in the Water narrates his own story set in 1945 New Guinea. He is a tribal leader largely concerned with food and shelter for his tribe and keeping the enemy headhunters away. Then one day a strange flying thing lands and a beautiful red-headed white woman emerges.
A Mile in These Shoes by
Price: Free! Words: 60,710. Language: English. Published: March 14, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
These nine stories describe people who live on the margins of society, people who are often oppressed and always ignored. These stories give them voice and let the reader into their worlds on the edge.
The Gift by
Price: Free! Words: 47,230. Language: English. Published: March 13, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Nonfiction » Philosophy » Biography, Essay » Literature
“The Gift is one woman's journey to find an answer from the horror of the past. It is a quest to bring to rest the guilt of the next generation, the children of the survivors and refugees surrounded by an immense family of ghosts...Seen through the cycle of the seasons, she, the first person narrator, tries to put the past not to rest but to life." Barb Radmore
Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America by
Price: Free! Words: 62,680. Language: English. Published: March 12, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
There is a lot of hay in this collection of short stories, hay to cut,rake, bale, store and feed. And there is a lot of rusted machinery sitting in sheds and barns. But these bittersweet stories are about the people who are largely overlooked, people living with powerful memories,illness, telling their stories, discovering some small revelation about the meaning of existence and their own lives.
The Return by
Price: Free! Words: 71,610. Language: English. Published: March 12, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
In The Return, two orphaned sisters return to their childhood home, thirty years after their parents murder hoping to find out what really happened. The perpetrator is dead, but will those who were with them talk? Lydia, a yoga teacher, feels her mother's spirit asking "Why?" Margie, a recent divorcee, abhors such notions, but as they both get involved in the community, surprising things happen.
Amalie in Orbit by
Price: $3.99 USD. Words: 57,060. Language: English. Published: March 12, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Amalie Price 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 husband, she must contend with her newly alienated teenage son, the threat of eviction from her Upper West Side apartment, and the need to earn a living.
Night Voices by
Price: $3.99 USD. Words: 62,210. Language: English. Published: March 10, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
A seemingly peaceful village at the edge of Oxford seethes with the unspoken tensions and frustrations of a group of neighbors. A disparate group of women react in wildly different ways to their enigmatic young male neighbor. As in all her novels, Helen Hudson's theme is about the tragedy that befalls the most vulnerable among us when good people lack the courage to reach out to them.
Where the Wind Blew by
You set the price! Words: 129,120. Language: English. Published: March 10, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
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 the American landscape. Decades later, he enjoys the the affluence of the late 1990s with his wife and children. But his life unravels when an ambitious high school reporter uncovers his secret.
Telling Tales by
Price: Free! Words: 95,810. Language: English. Published: March 8, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
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.”
Splendor from Darkness by
You set the price! Words: 389,720. Language: English. Published: March 8, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
a novel about the North African campaign in World War II and then the French Resistance, but also much more: a novel showing human nature on the edge, how human love can spring up and triumph under the most trying and desperate situations, a novel with well over a hundred characters that display the entire range of human nature all perfectly delineated with telling and convincing detail.
Stillbird by
Price: Free! Words: 57,480. Language: English. Published: March 5, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
(4.00 from 1 review)
From the strangling of a midwife perceived to be a witch in Scotland in the 1880s to thwarted love and the tragedy of incest in West Virginia during the depression thence to Denver on the eve of the sixties, accurate history is enhanced by elements of magical realism in this tale of five generations that is as ancient as the Greek tragedies and as modern as the daily news.
Envious Shadows by
Price: Free! Words: 136,340. Language: English. Published: March 4, 2012 by The Wessex Collective. Categories: Fiction » Literature » Literary
This is a novel about a black and white relationship in a small Maine town that explores the many forms of prejudice, particularly that of a racist Nazi group that hounds the couple and causes tragedy, but also many other external ways--class, religion, sexual orientation, even appearance and personality-- that people use to unfairly judge others.
Back to profile overview

The Wessex Collective's tag cloud

1960s communes    activism    adultery    aids    alcoholic mother    alienation    alzheimers    american jews    american nazis    amish rumschpringen    anthropologist    antiwar protestors    appalachia    art    atheism    auschwitz    ayn rand    being and nothingness    betrayal    billionaires    black humor    bomb plot    box store workers    boy loses father    bruno    buddhism    child prodigy    christianity    class hatred    class tensions    cocaine addiction    college ties    comedy    compassion    concentration camps    congregationalist minister    cousinly incest    creativity    czech legend    daycare center    death    democracy    denver    developmental disabilitiy    dick and jane    divorce    domestic violence    dust bowl    economists    elderly    empathy    fable    family    family saga    farming    father daughter relationship    fatherson relationship    faulkners miss emily    feminism    fishing    forgiveness    forgiveness and healing    freedom fighters    french resistance    fundamentalism    fundamentalist christians    funeral humor    gay child    genesis of cruelty    gothic    greed    green activist    guilt    headhunters    heroes    hidden jews ww2    highschool football hero    hiking    holocaust children    homelessness    human love    humor    illegitimate children    illiteracy    incest    indian mysticism    inspiration    interracial relationship    japanese erotic art    jealousy    judaism    kansas    kau the sky woman    lesbians    life after death    litbiz    literary ficiton    literary fiction    loss    love    love affair    love vs duty    magic realism    magical realism    maine    management    marginalization    memoir    memories    mental illness    metafiction    military field hospital    military rape trial    minamata disease    money laundering    mortality    mourning    mutability    new guinea 1945    new left    new orleanskatrina    nietzsche    north african campaign    novella    novice nun    nurses    oakies    oxford    peer pressure    periphery of society    persecution of indians    persecution of women    peru    polluter    poverty    predatory females    priestly abuse of boys    pythagoras    quaker    race    radicals    remorse    retirement home    rightwing minister    rocky mountain national park    satire    selfhood    sexism    shaping a poem    short stories    single mother    single mothers    social roles    social worker    softball    soldiers    sonnets    soup kitchen    special forces    spiritual counseling    starvation    street people    swamp yankee    tenth circle    tetrakyts of the dekad    the 1 percent    the seasons    time    tough teen    tragedy    truth and lies    underground    unions    univ of s maine    upper west side    utilities    uw madison    vengeance    venice beach    vietnam war    war guilt    wasps    widows    wisconsin    work    workplace    world war 2    wounded iraqi veteran    young love