The Planets and Awakening is Volume 5 in a series of astrological essays from some of astrology's leading lights. In this essay, astrologer Eric Meyers embraces a spiritual perspective of each of the planets in the horoscope and offers insight into becoming more conscious of these individual and collective energies.

A blockbusting collection of no less than TWELVE Short Stories. This is war fiction at its punchiest and best, including stories from Hawkins’ Heroes, SEAL Strike, Tank Platoon and Desert Strike. Why buy one, when for a low price you can download the entire compilation. That’s right, twelve stories at an unbeatable price.TANK PLATOON: FOR HONOR AND GLORYThe invasion of Iraq is underway, and PFC Carl Yeager, an M1 Abrams driver, is about to experience the hell of the Second G...

Stephen Crane was born 1st November, 1871 in Newark, New Jersey and was the eighth surviving child out of fourteen. Incredibly he began writing at the age of four and was published several times by the age of sixteen.Crane only began a full-time education when he was nine but quickly mastered the grades needed to catch up and move forward. Although educated at Lafayette and Syracuse he had little interest in completing university and was keener to move on to a career, declaring col...

Sherwood Anderson was born on 13th September 1876 in Camden, Ohio.When his father’s business failed the family was forced to move on a regular basis before finally settling in Clyde, Ohio.Anderson, one of 7 children, left school at 14 to take a number of jobs to help with the family finances. These were difficult years.He moved to Chicago in search of opportunities before joining the Army for the US-Spanish War of 1898. He then entered Wittenberg Academy in Springfi...

William Sydney Porter was born on 11th September 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. At age 3 his mother died from tuberculosis. From an early age it was clear Porter had a large appetite for reading as he absorbed the world around him.He first attended at a school run by his aunt before enrolling at the Lindsey Street High School and then worked at his uncle’s drugstore and gained a pharmacists’ license in 1881.A persistent cough took him to Texas in the hope that a change...

Herman Melville was born in New York City on 1st August 1819.At the age of 7 Melville contracted scarlet fever which permanently diminished his eyesight. Add this to a contemporary description of being "very backwards in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension" and his opportunities for success seemed limited.His father died when he was 12 leaving the family in very straitened times. 2 years later Melville took a job in a bank and followed up with a failed stint as a surv...

A wise man once said ‘The safest place for a child is in the arms of his mother’s voice’. This is a perfect place to start our anthology of female short stories.Some of our earliest memories are of our mothers telling us bedtime stories. This is not to demote the value of fathers but more to promote the often-overshadowed talents of the gentler sex.Perhaps ‘gentler’ is a word that we should re-evaluate. In the course of literary history it is men who dominated by opportunit...

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation.From its transatlantic roots it has absorbed the sons and daughters of other cultures, other lands and made them part of her own.America prides itself on liberty, on justice for all and, if you are a wealthy white man, that is essentially true. Sadly, many other segments of society find it difficult to feel or become part of this en...

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...

Alan Seeger was born on 22nd June 1888 in New York. When he was one the family moved to Staten Island and nine years later onwards to Mexico for two years.After attending several elite preparatory schools he enrolled at Harvard in 1906, where he also edited and wrote for the Harvard Monthly.He graduated in 1910 and went to live the life of a bohemian in New York’s Greenwich Village, and thereafter moved to Paris to continue his poetry writing in the Latin quarter.Wa...

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...